


Holding Out for a Hero

by J_Q



Series: Holding Out for a Hero [1]
Category: Shameless (US)
Genre: 10 years after S7, Canon Compliant, Drug reference, Happily Ever After, Hero!Mickey, Light Angst, M/M, Post-Canon, Romantic Adventure, Sexual Content, Swearing, some violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-05
Updated: 2017-11-05
Packaged: 2019-01-29 16:15:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 36,667
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12634638
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/J_Q/pseuds/J_Q
Summary: After a decade as a gun for hire all over Central America, Mickey Milkovich is tired and looking for a change. But with few options on the table, he finds himself coming to the rescue of an exasperating redhead that he hadn't thought he'd ever see again.Work complete: all chapters uploaded (to get you through week one of season 8)





	1. Gods and Men

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to Bonnie Tyler for “Holding Out for a Hero” and providing us with very specific criteria for what constitutes a hero. I recommend a listen to get in the mood. Thank you to Mickey Milkovich for becoming our reluctant hero. Thank you to the internet for providing me with so much information that I was then able to twist shamelessly to fit this story. Thank YOU for reading. I hope you enjoy.

Where have all the good men gone

And where are all the gods?

 

Mickey Milkovich was certain that there was nothing left in this world that could surprise him. He wasn’t fucking kidding when he said he’d seen, and done, it all and sitting in a stifling bar in a forgotten port town in Panama, he could honestly say he was fucking tired of it all. Well, he thought, looking down at the whiskey in his hand, he could still get it up for his old buddy Jack.

He tilted the stubby shot glass of smoky liquid up to his lips and swallowed, closing his eyes to the run-down drinking establishment. Not that he needed to have his eyes open to know that the floors were filthy, the tables scarred, the mood somber and the patrons mean.

When he’d sat down at a corner table near the back door a few hours earlier in hopes of obliterating the shit day he’d had, the place had been mostly empty, but now the “after work” crowd was steadily trickling in. He chuckled lowly to himself as he pictured a bunch of Panamanian mercenaries and guns for hire dressed in colorful skinny jeans, graphic tees and hipster haircuts stopping in for a Pabst Blue Ribbon lager after a day at the office.

During his years in the Central American jungle, both the concrete and natural variety, he’d helped as many Panamanian criminals out of a jam as he had trendy assholes backpacking through the Darién Gap in their thrift store _inspired_ fucking clothing.

His chuckle shifted to a wry sneer as he looked down at his own worn combat pants and black t-shirt with stains he was reluctant to identify. Well, he fit right in with both the rough trade drinking with him tonight and the hipster tourists littering the streets of Colón lately. He looked like a thrift store would think twice before accepting his clothing.

And then there was the unkept swatch of dark hair covering the lower half of his face. Who would a fucking thought his lack of proper grooming would eventually be in style?

Scanning the room for his favorite surly waitress, he decided that he’d fit in with the underbelly of society for too fucking long. So long, in fact, that he mostly couldn’t remember when he didn’t, when he was just a punk kid in Chicago selling shit to a bunch of tweekers and running a few guns for his old man. Not that he wasn’t part of the Chicago underbelly back then but at least it was his underbelly. Damn, he thought, as nostalgia swept over him, he missed his underbelly.

He also missed his Jack Daniels. Where the fuck was the waitress?

He caught the eye of the tall, muscled, heavily tattooed bartender, Javier, the closest thing he had to a friend in the city, and raised his dark eyebrows signalling for two more shots. And that’s when the steel enforced front door opened and Mickey realized that he could still be surprised. Very fucking surprised. Knocked on his ass with a sledgehammer surprised.

As if his mind had conjured it up moments before, in walked a pair of tight fitting, fucking rust colored, skinny jeans that left nothing to the imagination. Mickey’s eyes travelled up the set of long legs, over the leather belt hugging pronounced hipbones, across the expanse of flat abdomen and chest covered in a snug white V-neck and a navy short-sleeved button down hanging open, before finally landing on the waves of red hair slicked back and flopping dramatically to one side.

The sight of that hair sent a nearly paralyzing wave of sickness through Mickey’s throat, heart and gut before he even got a chance to look at the face.

Javier stepped directly into his line of vision, clunking his two shots onto the table and holding out his hand for payment. Mickey fumbled around in his pocket sorting through the various currencies until he found an American ten and tossed it at the outstretched hand. His eye snagged on the tattoo snaking over Javier’s forearm, and he figured that the broken and twisted heart with a goddamn machete through it was a fucking omen if he’d ever seen one. He also noticed that his own traitorous hand was shaking a little, probably from the way his heart was beating in his chest. Too goddamn fast.

Fuck. He hadn’t even looked at the face yet, but he damn well knew. It may have been nearly a decade since he’d seen that face, but his fucking body knew when it was in the same room. It would know Ian fucking Gallagher anywhere.

What he wouldn’t give to have a smoke in his hand right now. He’d have to go outside and line up with the rest of the assholes puffing on the street corner, but no way in hell was he going to draw attention to himself by standing up. So he slunk down in his spindly ass little chair, ducked his head toward his whiskey, letting his overgrown black hair fall over his forehead, and watched Ian through his lashes.

The tall drink of fucking water glanced quickly around the dim, increasingly loud dive; his stupidly perfect face with its stupidly perfect square jaw showed signs of unease before his goddamn chin lifted in determination. Like that sight didn’t haunt Mickey’s dreams to this day.

Following the bartender’s movements as he returned to his post, Ian adjusted the heavy, grey canvas backpack he was carrying and moved toward the bar, stepping between two ancient Panamanian dudes who were probably sitting on those bar stools when the Panama Canal was built.

Mickey couldn’t hear the conversation between the tall redhead and the even taller bartender, but he could see Ian’s hand nervously tapping his thigh before reaching into his pocket for some cash that he laid on the top of the bar. Javier filled a glass with cheap beer on tap and slid it over to Ian, who wrapped his hand around it but didn’t drink, just continued to stare at the bartender. Eventually Javier slanted his head toward the back corner of the room. The back fucking corner where Mickey was sitting.

What the hell, Javier, you shithead? Mickey screamed internally before turning his face away from the two men, hoping that…what? If he couldn’t see Ian, then Ian couldn’t see him. Well, it was worth a fucking try.

Go away, go away, go away, he prayed.

“Excuse me? The bartender thought you might be able to help me.”

If Mickey had thought the sight of the redhead was a shock to his system, hearing that light, sweet, questioning voice nearly undid him. The blood rushed through his veins. The hairs on the back of his neck tingled. Tensing to contain the shiver about to erupt down his spine, he rolled his shoulders back and brought his hand up to his mouth to swipe the bottom lip he had just moistened with his tongue.

“Mickey?”

Aw, fuck, Mickey winced, don’t say my goddamn name in that uncertain, breathy way. With more regret than he could begin to describe, Mickey lifted his eyes to meet their fate.

A decade of blue anger met a decade of green hurt and held for what felt like another decade. Until Ian broke the eye contact with a flutter of his lashes, lowering his eyes to the beer he was holding. Mickey watched his jaw tense and his Adam’s apple bob while he searched the contents of the glass. Was he hoping to find an answer in the bottom of a beer glass? Mickey had tried that tactic ad nauseum and all it offered was ad nausea.

When Ian’s fingers clenched around the glass, a new thought occurred to Mickey. Was he thinking about sharing the contents of the glass with Mickey’s face? Sitting back warily in his chair, he crossed his arms resting them on his chest and gave Ian his number one eyebrow display, the condescending one. Daring Ian to do his worst.

Even with his eyes trained on the beer glass, Ian must’ve seen Mickey’s movements because he hissed a little and let his backpack drop to one of the empty chairs, then both him and the glass flopped down to join Mickey. When the beer sloshed over the edge of the glass, Ian brought the knuckle of his left hand to his mouth and licked off the liquid.

Mickey closed his eyes and inhaled deeply through his nose, while calling his dick every name he could think of hoping it would take the fucking hint, but instead when he opened his eyes, he glanced at Ian’s mouth again because his fucking dick was in charge apparently. And that was what had Mickey so worried. His dick had always been in charge where Ian Gallagher was concerned.

The places, the situations, the predicaments he got himself into just so he could bang the goddamn redhead were legendary. That ain’t an exaggeration either because they were caught fucking more times than he cared to remember. Their status as fags was legendary on Chicago’s southside, especially after shouting to an entire block of family, friends and strangers how much he fucking loved Ian’s dick and what specifically he like to do with that dick. Just one of the extensive list of reasons Mickey had spent the better part of his adult life 4000 miles from home. Well, that and being a fugitive, he amended.

“Jesus Christ, what do you want, Gallagher?”

Ian’s eyes nearly popped out of his head, he opened them so wide. “Seriously, that’s how you want to start this conversation?” he huffed.

“We ain’t having a _conversation_ , man. You are gonna tell me in 25 words or less what the hell you want and I’m going to point you in that direction, then I’m going to continue to get shitfaced and pretend that you are still back in fucking Chicago moving on with your fucking life.” Mickey threw his eyebrows up to his hairline in a challenge.

A challenge Ian was apparently happy to accept as he also lifted his eyebrows before responding. “Well, if we only have 25 words, then you’ve about doubled your share already, so I guess you’re gonna have to shut the fuck up for the rest of this _conversation_.”

“Sassy fucking bitch as usual,” Mickey spat.

“That’s five more words.”

Mickey could almost, _almost_ appreciate Ian’s spunk, but he knew, fucking _knew_ that if he gave Ian even a microscopic opening, he would tear that crack apart before Mickey had a chance to say, “how do you fucking do”. So he increased his glower, lowered his chin, tightened his arms and waited. Let the little shit do all the work. He was gonna just sit here and be cool.

Fuck.

The fire in Ian dimmed somewhat after the outburst. He appeared a little lost and, for Christ sake, a little scared. He picked up the glass and sucked back some of the beer, grimacing in distaste. That perked Mickey up a little. No fancy hipster beer to be found around here, motherfucker.

“I, um, need help finding someone,” Ian glanced up at Mickey then over to the bar. “The bartender said that you were the guy people went to when they needed help. Help that you can’t get legally.” His fingers were running up and down the sides of the glass leaving marks in the condensation.

“So imagine my surprise,” Ian continued with a bit more attitude, “when it turned out that Mickey Milkovich was the go to guy for illegal shit. Shocked to say the least.”

“Fuck you, asshole,” Mickey drawled, and then wished he could take the words back as Ian’s eyes met his again. He could see the pattern in Ian’s breathing shift and his chest rising and falling unnaturally. A flush crept up Mickey’s face as the one thing he was fighting to not think about was now front and center. Where it always was, just waiting for the two of them to blindly trip over it in their haste to get on each other.

Not this goddamn time.

Ian brought the cool glass to his cheek. “Jesus, it’s hot in this part of the world,” he complained under his breath, plucking the t-shirt from his chest in a fanning motion before letting it fall back in place and cling to his chest. “Puts Chicago summers to shame.”

Mickey waited, neither confirming nor denying his status as the go to guy or the status of the weather in Central America, just staring at Ian and hoping like hell he appeared bored or disinterested or, at the very least, just not fucking horny.

“Right, you want to get rid of me. I got it.” Ian pursed his lips before continuing, “Someone important to me is missing. I haven’t heard from him in over two weeks. The last email I got he was here in Colón and then he just disappeared. No word, no explanation. Nothing.”

Still Mickey was silent. He had one shot of whiskey left, and as he tilted the shot glass, the liquid danced around the rim. The nonchalance was most definitely an act because inside Mickey was seething. The use of _he_ and _him_ wasn’t lost on him. Ian thought he’d hit up Mickey to help him find his fucking boyfriend, or by the looks of his preppy outfit and fancy ass backpack, his fucking husband.

He threw the shot of whiskey back, hoping for a wicked burn as it went down but no such luck. He’d built up a resistance to all but the very bottom of the barrel liquor. Still he did feel a little warmth in his chest that distracted him for second from the larger pain that he was experiencing in his ass. He whacked the shot glass down on the table causing Ian to jump slightly and continue his tale of woe.

“He was down here on, um, business and I think that something went wrong with the, um, transaction.” Ian’s eyes were tracking the movements of two ex-pat Colombian dudes who couldn’t agree on which station the one flat screen should be tuned to. “He was staying next door at the Hotel Plaza, but he checked out two weeks ago.”

When one of the two unhappy bar patrons barked out a curt, “Yo cago en la leche de tu puta madre” and then pulled out a small clip point blade, Ian flinched and pulled his backpack into his lap.

Mickey watched in some amusement as the pissing contest moved closer and closer to their table and Ian sat further and further back in his chair. He turned to Mickey, “What did he say to him?”

Letting out a laugh, he translated, “I shit in your whore mother’s milk.” Eyeing the one with the blade, he added, “Not his finest insult but not his worst.”

“You know these guys?” Ian narrowed his eyes at Mickey.

“Well, sure, these fellows are some of my business associates,” Mickey smiled slightly, standing up. “Ain’t that right, boys?” He stepped between the two men and clasped his hand on the shoulder of the guy with the open blade. “¿Que paso ahuevao, Mateo?”

The point of the blade shifted toward Mickey’s gut and Ian sucked in an audible breath, but Mickey’s hand trapped the Colombian’s and squeezed. He lifted his chin toward the bartender, who was pulling out his cell phone.

The two Colombian’s backed away from each other muttering more filth before parting, while Javier put his phone away and nodded at Mickey.

Ian stood up, his backpack still clasped to his chest, and planted his tall ass self in front of Mickey. “Look, I’m starving and I need to take my pills on a full stomach. Could we go somewhere and eat while I explain what’s going on?”

Fucking Gallagher, thought Mickey. He so totally knew that Mickey had a soft spot where Ian’s bipolar condition was concerned. Hell, short of killing him with Mateo’s knife and throwing his body in the canal, he was stuck with the stubborn asshole. At least for as long as it took to pawn him off on someone else.

“Fine. But don’t think this means we’re gonna have a _conversation_.”

 


	2. Rising Odds

 

Where’s the streetwise Hercules to fight the rising odds?

 

Exiting the bar, Mickey led them west toward the Bay of Manzanillo. He immediately lit a cigarette, looking at Ian to see if he was going to light up. “I’m trying to quit.”

“Figures,” Mickey muttered, mild disgust in his voice. Then he took a huge inhale and let it out with gusto making a couple of giant smoke rings for emphasis.

“Dick,” Ian snarked, grabbing the cigarette out of Mickey’s fingers before he could stop him. Ian brought the smoke to his lips and inhaled, closing his eyes in pleasure. Mickey watched him and forcefully blocked all thoughts from entering his head. Before Ian could return it, Mickey pulled out another one. No way he was letting his lips anywhere near that cigarette now.

As he brought the lighter up to the smoke, he could feel Ian’s eyes and flicked his own up to meet them. “What?”

“What happened to your tattoos?” Ian gestured to his hands.

“Gone.” A one word end to the conversation. As soon as he replied, Ian’s eyes moved to Mickey’s chest, but he didn’t ask the question.

They continued to walk bathed in the clingy, humid night air and awareness of each other. Past overflowing garbage containers and abandoned, boarded up buildings. Past colorful graffiti about stopping corruption and tattered posters for past political campaigns.

“What you want to eat?” Mickey asked and tried not to feel the natural comradery that was such a huge part of what they once were, how just walking beside Ian could calm his mind and soften his heart. “You a vegan now? Gluten free?”

The chuckle stalled on his lips when he looked at Ian’s face. “Fuck me.”

“It helps a little with my symptoms to monitor what I eat.” A light blush travelled over Ian’s cheeks, and he puffed a little harder on the cigarette.

“We’ll go to Arrecifes,” Mickey muttered, torn between total scorn and reluctant understanding. “They got fish and rice, yeah?”

Ian nodded and stepped around a torn bag of trash and a flat tire, his eyes scanning the street undoubtedly concerned that one of the run-down storefronts was the restaurant Mickey mentioned, when a skinny dog with a missing eye looked up from an abandoned entryway. “Why did you choose here to live, Mickey?”

Whether the words were intended to be a judgment or not, the softly spoken question worked like gasoline on embers. “Why do I live where? Here in Panama? Did you fucking forget dumping my ass at the border? Did you forget I’m a fucking fugitive? What the fuck, Ian?” he exclaimed in disbelief, his voice rising with each question.

“I-“

“We’re not having a goddamn conversation remember, Gallagher,” he all but shouted and turned to Ian for impact. “Don’t.”

They remained silent for several minutes as they travelled closer to the water. The real estate improving with each block until they arrived at a seaside restaurant with colorful stucco walls and a mismatched brick sidewalk leading up to the open doorway.

The inside was as colorful as the outside with a checkered floor and fishing related paraphernalia hanging on every available part of the wall. They sat at a red Formica table butted up against the half wall overlooking the Bay and the long line of container-laden ships in the distance.

After Mickey ordered them some red snapper, coconut rice and fried plantains and of course, a couple of beers, he finally turned to Ian who was looking much more relaxed. “Speak.”

Ian sat forward a little and looked closely at Mickey, searching one eye and then the next. He furrowed his brow and chewed his lip. He inhaled and exhaled. “What the fuck, man?!?” Mickey barked, pissed at how much of a pipe dream the upper hand was when Gallagher was around.

Giving a little nod, Ian reached under the table and rummaged around in his backpack while the heavy-set waitress sat two Budweisers on the table. He pulled out a couple of folded pieces of paper and set them on the table beside the beer bottles, keeping his fingers pressed into them.

“I believe that this is why my, uh, friend has gone missing,” Ian stated looking down at the paper under his fingers drawing Mickey’s eye and his unwilling interest, damn it.

“Cryptic much?” Taking a swig from the bottle, Mickey looked around the restaurant. It was lightly populated; a couple of underdressed, underaged teenage girls were sitting at a corner table plucking at their phones, an overdressed middle-aged man was watching them from his seat at the long bar, and the waitress was clearing plates from a table near the door. “I don’t think the National Guard or the CIA or fucking KGB are hiding in the potted plant over there. Gonna let me see the big secret?”

The tip of Ian’s mouth slanted up and he pulled his hand back. While Mickey picked up the papers, Ian took a drink and sighed in relief at the familiar taste, no doubt. Mickey knew the feeling, the flavors of home.

Despite teasing Ian about his furtive behavior, Mickey carefully opened the paper keeping it close to his body and low to the table. He glanced down and frowned. “Is this fucking science? Your man went missing because of science?” He laughed heartily and shook his head. “Like did he need help with his homework?”

Ian reached across the table and plucked the paper from Mickey’s hand. “No, well, yes, it’s science but it’s serious shit, Mick.”

“It don’t matter how serious this shit is, I definitely ain’t your go to guy for science. Fuck, I probably failed science after it got harder than learning what the four fucking seasons are.”

Two plates of steaming, colorful food arrived. Ian was momentarily silenced as he shovelled fish in making up for nearly a day of starvation. “Take your pills, man,” Mickey mumbled around his fork.

Eventually, the food was gone, their stomachs were full and their animosity returned. “So what the hell are you doing in Panama with a couple of sheets of paper with squiggles and hexagons and random goddamn letters all over them?”

Leaning forward, Ian whispered, “It’s the chemical formula for a methamphetamine/cocaine combination that can be made from common ingredients and is highly, highly stable.”

“WHAT?” Mickey hissed under his breath but still harsh enough to earn a look from the man at the bar who was nursing a beer. “Fuck, it really is science.”

“Science worth killing over,” Ian shuddered out a breath, obviously not considering this for the first time.

“Hell yeah. Especially around here. The Darién Gap between here and Colombia is the Wal-Mart of drug production.”

Ian pressed the papers to his chest and winced at Mickey’s words. “Oh, god. What if we’re too late? What if he’s already been—,” Ian forced out as much of the sentence as he could. “I’ll never forgive myself for not paying closer attention to what he was doing. Jesus, I am always so caught up in my own shit. I should have paid attention to the signs that things weren’t right.”

Most of that little speech was directed at the paper in Ian’s hands not at Mickey, who remained quiet. He could feel some sympathy for Ian’s remorse, but it was asking too much to want Mickey to mourn Ian’s lover. Even a decade after Ian kicked him to the curb, shoving his heartfelt offer of goddamn lifelong love back in his fucking face, Mickey could still feel the sting as though it were happening today at that exact fucking moment. So, no, he wasn’t going to cry his eyes out for the man who had taken Mickey’s place.

“Why would your husband be caught up in shit like this anyway? Is he a fucking scientist or some shit?”

“My husband? I don’t have a husband.”

“Boyfriend. Live-in grandpa lover, whatever.”

“I live with my brother.”

“Well, who the fuck is missing then?” Mickey watched Ian look away, pretending to be busy shoving the papers back in his bag. “Who is it, Ian?”

“Does it matter? Someone I care about.”

Mickey just waited.

“Fine. It’s Lip.”

“Lip?”

Ian sat up and met Mickey’s disbelieving eyes. “Shit, I, yes, shit,” he fumbled out before his shoulders drooped in defeat. “I was hoping to keep that from you as long as possible as I thought it might be a deal breaker.”

“Ya think?”

“Come on, Mickey. He’s still my brother. I know he’s a dick. Of epic proportions sometimes, but he’s, he’s my brother, man.” Ian pleaded with his words, his voice and his eyes. “I’ve come all this way to find him, to help him. If he needs me, I don’t want to let him down.”

“I’m really fucking moved by your show of loyalty,” Mickey tried to keep the bitterness out of his voice, but it was such a slippery, slimy feeling that it could find its way between even the best intentions. “Loyal Ian Gallagher, that’s like one of those, whatchamacallits, oxymorons.”

“I’m sorry. I know I hurt—”

“Save it, man. Not interested,” Mickey spat, pushing back in his chair. Using his body language like a shield around his heart.

Ian mashed his lips together and looked over Mickey’s shoulder. “Right, I understand. I didn’t mean to drag you into this. I’m sorry.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a couple of American twenties and, signalling to the waitress, he laid them on the table. “I’m going to head to the bathroom then find a room for the night. It was, um, it really was good to see you again, Mickey. I—well, never mind. Good-bye.”

He grabbed his fancy ass backpack and sailed dramatically toward the restrooms at the back of the restaurant. As the door closed behind him, Mickey felt his heart swell to twice it’s usual size. Goddamn that little fucker, that was classic Ian Gallagher and Mickey fucking missed the prick with every molecule of his body. It was motherfucking science.

 

 

Ian was spiraling. Bad. Pulled between two competing thoughts. Mickey. Lip. Lip. Mickey. His brain wanted to focus on the fact that he had just seen Mickey, talked with Mickey, eaten with Mickey, fought with Mickey. He wanted to analyze every moment and agonize over what it meant. He wanted to beg Mickey to hear him out. He just—but Lip was fucking missing and probably in serious shit right this minute. He couldn’t afford to think about anything else.

The dim lighting in the little bathroom did nothing for Ian’s drawn complexation, it emphasized the shadows under his eyes and the tired lines around his mouth. He was looking more than his 29 years today. Thanks to Lip, that ass.

Glancing away from the mirror, he grabbed the little soft covered journal and pencil from his backpack. He needed to clear his mind of anxiety as best he could if he was going to succeed in his mission to save his brother’s useless life. So he scribbled some thoughts allowing the fear and tension to drain from his brain onto the page. He needed a plan now.

He hadn’t really had a plan beyond asking at the hotel Lip had been staying at. When he’d stopped in at the bar next to the hotel, the bartender suggested that he hire a “guide”, and he felt like he might just be able to do what he’d set out to do.

When he’d adjusted to the fact the guide was Mickey, he had felt elated for so many reasons that it almost overwhelmed him to the point of shock. Beyond the fact that he trusted Mickey to find Lip if Lip was find-able, he was actually in the same room as Mickey after all these years. Glancing down at his journal, he could see the word Mickey popping up all over the page.

“Shit!” he spat, frantically stuffing his journal into his backpack and racing out of the bathroom. What was he thinking? Emotional idiot, he couldn’t let Mickey out of his sight again. He’d done it once before, ten years ago, and never heard from him again.

The table where they’d eaten was empty and cleared off as though the meal had never happened. Jesus, no. His eyes quickly scanned the room but didn’t land on the only face in the world that had a full-time position in his mind even when he hadn’t actually seen it since he was a damn teenager.

Out the door, his eyes quickly adjusted to the dark sky and weak street lightening. Which way would he go? Back where they’d come from? He could return to the bar and ask or wait for him to return. Chewing his already non-existent thumb nail, he hesitated on the sidewalk looking around slowly.

A plume of smoke rose up into the dim light from the side of the restaurant and his eyes travelled to the source. Mickey leaned against the stucco wall giving Ian an assessing look.

Ian could feel the tears gathering behind his eyes as relief washed over his body. “Mickey,” he breathed walking toward him, inundated with images from his youth. “I hated it when you shaved your beard off years ago.”

“Always reminds me of Frank catching us in the freezer at the Kash n Grab,” Mickey said softly, reaching up to scratch at the black mass covering his face. “That asshole still around?”

“Yeah, still the main feature at the Alibi on cheap night.”

They stared at each other in a silent battle for control. Mickey taking long pulls from his cigarette, and Ian grasping the strap of the backpack so tight his fingers were going numb. Eventually Ian tilted his head just a little in a searching manner asking for some sort of acceptance, and Mickey pushed away from the wall. He knew from the moment he saw those long legs walk through the door that he would be helpless to deny Ian whatever he had to offer. No sense pretending otherwise.

“So science, huh?”

“Thank you,” Ian whispered and smiled tentatively while releasing the death grip on his backpack.


	3. Dream of What I Need

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For Tatto0lov3: there'd be no flirty Mickey without you <3

Late at night I toss and I turn

And I dream of what I need

 

“Wow. You have a great view,” Ian commented, surprise in his voice. He was standing at the living room window of Mickey’s small apartment on the second floor above Nuevo Mini Super, a Kash n Grab style convenience store, but the view was high enough to see over the roof of the building standing between Mickey’s and the Caribbean Sea. An assortment of broken and forgotten air conditioning units littered the rooftop, but beyond that the lights of Colón’s harbour.

“For a shithole?” Mickey asked, throwing his keys on the tiny kitchen table and walking toward his bedroom door.

“What? No, I meant—never mind,” he stammered as Mickey disappeared into the bedroom returning immediately with a lightweight blanket and a pillow. He dropped the items on the old velvet tufted cushions of the sofa and motioned to the bathroom.

“There should be a clean towel in there if you need one. We’ll head back to Lip’s hotel in the morning. See if we can pick up his trail,” Mickey explained, looking everywhere but at Ian. “Night.”

With that he’s gone, the bedroom door clicking softy behind him. Ian was left standing in Mickey’s apartment still acclimatizing himself to this new reality. He pulled his phone charger out of his backpack and glanced around for a plug in, absorbing every detail in an attempt to paint a picture of Mickey’s life the last ten years, but the sparse furnishings and lack of personal items gave little away or maybe gave too much away.

There were a few take out menus stuck to the ancient looking fridge with an American flag fridge magnet, which broke Ian’s heart just a little bit.

There were several boxes of Tulammo 9mm luger rounds lined up along the tiny kitchen cupboard and a pile of almost scary looking fruit in a wooden bowl sitting on the table. Three pairs of shoes at the front door and a slightly tattered copy of _The Way of the Peaceful Warrior_ on the oval coffee table. That’s basically it.

Taking his backpack to the tiny bathroom, he washed his hands and stared at the toothbrush propped up in a juice cup, the bottle of mouthwash on the glass ledge under the mirror, the jar of Sauvecito hair pomade. Quickly finishing in the bathroom, he avoided looking at himself in the mirror or at any more of Mickey’s personal hygiene items.

Kicking his sneakers off and folding his clothes neatly, he laid back on the pillow with Mickey’s book in his hands and wondered whether the lack of possessions was a reflection of choice or necessity. Whether he’d made a life for himself despite his circumstances. Whether he’d found a way to become a peaceful warrior.

Opening up the book, he discovered two interesting items. A photo, taped to the inside cover, of a boy with two missing front teeth, which he assumed had to be Yev at about six. By Ian’s calculations, the photo would have been taken about five years ago. How did Mickey get the photo? Has he had contact with his son?

There is also an inscription in black pen on the inside cover of the book. _Mickey, A warrior doesn’t seek pain, but if pain comes, he uses it. Love, Ernesto._

Ian’s heart thumped hard in his chest, first at the word _pain_ , then at the word _love_. He had spent ten years alternating between those two points: the pain of loving Mickey. He blocked his brain from going down the path of who Ernesto might be, but allowed a brief image of a saintly old man in long robes putting a comforting hand on Mickey’s shoulder and offering sage advice.

Flipping to page one, he shifted over to his side to begin reading, but his throat closed and tears filled his eyes. He turned his head into the pillow and inhaled. Mickey’s pillow, his scent. More than 3000 days since he’d smelled it, but it hadn’t changed at all. If anything, it smelled better.

The book slipped closed and he hugged it along with the pillow close to his body, curling around them and allowed his mind to wander through memories he’d kept locked away for more than 3000 days.

 

On the other side of the bedroom door, Mickey lay on his back staring at the ceiling fan as it lazily turned. Round and round, just like his mind. He’d thought jerking off would help him forget shit and fall asleep, but instead it had worked his mind up more. Because, of course, once he started rubbing himself, his mind went where it usually did to feed its sexual fantasy.

It had conjured up a pretty detailed and lifelike scenario where Gallagher had knocked on his door, then entered without permission crawling into his bed and molding his body against Mickey’s back. His hand coming around to pump Mickey’s cock, and his mouth pushing against his ear repeating the words “I wanna fuck you” over and over until he came, both physically and to his senses.

He was well aware that at the height of the fantasy, he’d a paid a king’s fucking ransom for the situation to be real. Now he was wide awake, still horny and fucking worried he wouldn’t be able to keep his distance if it came down to it. So he flicked the bedside lamp on and lit a smoke, planning to skim through some pages of his book as a reminder that the hardest battles we fight are inside. But his book wasn’t sitting on he small nightstand next to the lamp like it should be.

It was in the living room next to Gallagher. Shit. Now he was fucked. He was gonna beat himself up for being a pussy if he didn’t go get it, but he was also not in charge of his legs apparently. He kicked the sheet off and willed his legs over the edge of the double bed. Just walk out there, nod hello, grab the book and be back in 30 seconds.

And he was up and out the door before he could reply to himself.

Ian was already asleep, curled up on the sofa with the pillow and Mickey’s copy of _Peaceful Warrior_ clutched to his chest. His face was relaxed but there were dark smudges under his lashes and his lips looked chapped. Not sleeping and lip biting from stress no doubt. Well, he wasn’t gonna be able to read his book now, so he turned off the lamp beside Ian and went to bed himself. Finding it easier to fall sleep now for some reason.

 

 

“Rise ‘n fuckin’ shine, Sleeping Beauty,” Mickey called out. “You want to find that asshole you call a brother or sleep the fucking day away?” The smell of brewed coffee and the sounds of cooking accompanied the abrupt wake-up call, and Ian smiled to himself. God, he missed that shit-talking thug more than he’d allowed himself to admit.

Swinging his legs over the side of the couch, Ian got to his feet and stretched the kinks that had formed from sleeping on a too small couch. The blanket fell from his shoulders in the process and, as he brought his arms back down to his sides, he locked eyes with Mickey. He was holding a frying pan in one hand and a flipper in the other and the admiration in his eyes quickly shifted to anger. “Put some fucking clothes on, asshole.”

Ian grabbed his jeans and pulled them back on, his t-shirt following quickly. “Sorry,” he mumbled in embarrassment.

“Yeah, well, I made eggs, so take your goddamn pills too.”

They ate their eggs and drank coffee at Mickey’s little kitchen table. “So all we know is that Lip used that famous brain of his to concoct a super drug, got on a plane to Panama, then sent you a cryptic email a few days before he disappeared?” Mickey recounted.

“Basically, yeah,” Ian agreed. “His email said that he wanted me to have a copy of the formula in case something happened. That he’d explain when he got back. I emailed him right back trying to get details out of him, but all I got was the name of his hotel here and that he was working with a _friend_ down here on a scheme that could make them a lot of money.”

“No idea who the friend is?” Grabbing a steak knife from the drawer behind him, he sliced off the ends of a bright red potato-looking thing from the fruit basket on the table.

“Your guess is as good as mine, or maybe better. I don’t know anyone with connections to the drug trade other than a few kids on the corner selling weed. Not exactly living like _Breaking Bad_.”

Cutting a gouge in the side, Mickey used his thumb to peel back the fruit’s skin revealing a deep red fleshy center, which he cut into and then placed two thick slices onto Ian’s plate. “Prickly pear.”

Ian looked dubiously at the red fruit, but broke off a piece with this fork. It hit his tongue and his eyes widen. “Sweet,” he declared in surprise.

Mickey slid a chunk into his mouth and mumbled around it, “I like ‘em sweet.” But he was standing up and carrying his plate to the sink before Ian would respond to that.

Rising with his own plate and mug, Ian cleared his throat and asked, “Do you think you’ll be able to find out more about Lip at the hotel than I did?”

“Did you speak Spanish? Offer them any cash? Suggest _strongly_ that it’s _very_ important to think hard about what they remember?”

“Um, no, I just confirmed that Lip had been there and actually checked out.”

“Then I guess the answer to your question is yes.”

 

 

And $40, several roughly conjugated verbs and one firmly placed hand later, they learned that Lip had asked if there were any non-official ways to get to Colombia.

Back out on the sidewalk, Ian paced in front of Mickey. “So are we going to the harbour to ask around? See if anyone saw Lip get on a cargo ship?” He stopped in front of Mickey briefly before starting to pace again. “What are the chances that anyone will remember after two fucking weeks?”

Mickey just puffed on his smoke eyeing Ian calmly. “What the fuck is he doing, Mick? What’s in Colombia? Now we’ve got two goddamn countries to search?” Ian dragged a breath in through his nose and stopped pacing and ranting.

“You done, man?”

“Yes.”

“There aren’t that many ships into carrying illegal human cargo, more likely to find fucking coconuts. So it’s not like we gotta check every vessel,” he explained, sorting through ideas and data. “Plus it’s even less common that the illegal human cargo is gonna be a whiny white boy from Chicago.”

“Okay, yeah, that’s good,” Ian nodded eagerly, encouraging Mickey to go on.

Mickey crushed the cigarette butt with the heel of his trail sandals and glanced up at Ian. “But you gotta understand one thing,” he said firmly, maintaining eye contact. “Once a person is on a ship, the captain is under no obligation to get them to their destination.”

“What do you mean? Under no obligation?” Ian’s eager nodding switched to head shaking.

“Well, it’s not unheard-of for people to spend weeks, or even months, sailing around to various ports before eventually arriving at their destination. Free labour basically,” Mickey explained shrugging his shoulders. “He may decide to get off at a location other than the one he was hoping for if the ship’s taking too long to get where it’s going. Or maybe Lip’s destination is one of the stops along the way.”

“So Lip could be anywhere in the fucking world, then?”

With a shrug of his eyebrows, Mickey concluded, “He’s probably not in Chicago.”

Ian felt the laughter bubble up and with it another bubble of anxiety release. He can’t help the sigh that rushes up with it or the way his eyes soften as he looks at Mickey. How can someone he hasn’t see in so long know him better than the people he has seen almost daily his whole life?

In that moment, if Mickey hadn’t turned away and starting walking, Ian would have moved in to touch him. Even just the tips of his fingers on the other man’s arm. Hell, even just getting near enough to feel his body heat. Anything.

“Come on, Gallagher. We got a lot of legwork ahead of us.”

 

 

The Port of Colón was a monster, in Ian’s limited experience anyway. People, ships, cargo containers, shops, cruise ships that took his breath away. He could feel the panic rising again at how impossible their task was. He had already shown his phone screen to an assortment of people asking if they’d seen the man in the picture. Nothing.

Mickey was adamant that Lip would have asked around about illegal passage in the Club Nautica Caribe area near the shopping mall. It was within walking distance of the hotel, had a lot of foot traffic and smaller sailing vessels. The other ports dealt in ocean liners and cargo containers.

But now, three hours later, Ian was certain they’d never find Lip in all of this. How could one man stand out in this chaotic mass of metal and ocean and human interaction?

The tension in Ian’s head was morphing into a steady throb, and he could feel his eyes jumping from one thing to the next unable to focus. His throat was drying out and he needed to sit down. Now. But where? “Mickey?” he blurted in panic.

“Hey, hey, Gallagher, you okay?” Mickey asked and when Ian continued to search frantically around the plaza, he wrapped his hand around Ian’s bicep and gave it a small tug. “Look at me.”

The feel of Mickey’s hand pulled Ian’s scattered thoughts and senses together and focussed them on the heat building in his arm. He raised his eyes from where their bodies were finally touching, up to Mickey’s eyes and his hand slowly followed his gaze, searching for Mickey’s cheek. Just as it was about to make contact, Mickey stepped back.

“Fuck. We gotta get you some water and shade. Sorry, man, I forgot that it takes time to get used to this ass kicking climate and we’ve been doing a lot of walking.” He scanned the area and spotted an empty table with an umbrella near the shopping plaza food court. “Sit,” he commanded when they got to the table.

“Sorry, I just kinda lost it there for a minute,” Ian mumbled, still reeling from the strength of both his panic and how quickly he calmed at Mickey’s touch. He’d forgotten, so much. He’d forgotten the important stuff.

“I’ll get us some water and something to eat,” Mickey said glancing around the outdoor food court and the options. “Subway?”

Ian’s eyes widen in surprise. “Sure, that sounds comforting,” he laughed at himself. Barely two days into his trip and he’s already pining for home. “Lip would be all over that place. Loves subs.”

Their eyes met and Ian jumped up. Dehydration and anxiety forgotten.

When he shoved his phone in the face of the breathtaking Afro-Caribbean girl behind the counter, she let out a little huff and her eyes darted away. Ian started to step around the counter in his haste to find out what she knew. But in a strange twist of circumstances, Mickey became the good cop in this scenario.

“We’d like to order a couple of subs.” Mickey smiled at her and stepped slightly in front of Ian so he could lean his body against the counter. “Any chance you got a break coming up some time soon?” He glanced down at her name tag, “Edith.”

She brought her long red nail to her lip and bit down on it, looking over her shoulder at an older man filling the little tubs of lettuce. In a low voice, she said, “Sí, quince minutos.” Then tilted her head to the table they had been sitting at.

Fifteen minutes later, full and hydrated, Ian was getting excited again as the petite young woman made her way toward their table. Instead of sitting down, she motioned for them to follow her. Around the back side of the outdoor shopping complex, she stopped and looked at Mickey, “¿Cigarrillo?”

He tapped a cigarette out of his pack and lit it before handing it to the girl. Allowing her to inhale and exhale once, Ian couldn’t wait any long. “You know my brother, don’t you?”

“Lip,” she said in a husky lilt and Ian could just imagine how his shithead brother knew this girl. “Sí, we spend some time together. Maybe two weeks ago.”

Ian wanted to roll his eyes at her and demand she get to the fucking point, but for the second time today, Mickey’s fingers clenched around his bicep. The girl’s eyes followed the movement, then shifted between the men before a sly smile formed on her glossy lips. Her full attention turned to Mickey, obviously the alpha male in this situation.

“We think he might be in some trouble,” Mickey explained, shifting his body so he could rest his hand against the wall behind her. “Do you know where he is or where he was headed?”

With one hip jutting out to expose the smooth skin of her hipbone, she leaned back against the wall so her head rested on Mickey’s hand. “I introduce him to my cousin, Hector, who works on supply ship traveling south. He goes to Cartagena after stopping in Puerto Obaldia,” she explained bringing the cigarette to her mouth then swiping her tongue over her lips. “I am free after work.”

Ian couldn’t believe what he was seeing. In fact, he was in such a state of shock over it, he felt like maybe he was having another attack like he’d had earlier. Right in front of his eyes, Mickey pulled the cigarette out of the girl’s fingers and brought it to his lips, sucking in smoke then placing it back between her lips.

Sliding his eyes down her body and up again, Mickey asked, “You remember the name of this supply ship?”

She dropped the cigarette to the ground between them and leaned forward to crush it, allowing her body to rub lightly against Mickey’s chest. “ _Don Benjamin_. Out of Panama City.”

Mickey’s eyes lingered on her lips. “You seen your cousin since he headed out with Lip?”

“No, has not returned yet,” she murmured, pouting her lips a little and tracing her fingers down Mickey’s abdomen stopping short of his belt. Ian clenched his hands as her fingers paused before pulling away to flick her long auburn-tinted hair over her shoulder.

“Thanks. You should probably get back to work,” Mickey said, picking up the gold cross hanging between her perky little breasts. “Don’t want you getting into any trouble on our account.”

She pushed away from them, her hand running along Mickey’s chest and shoulder. “Nos vemos,” she wiggled her fingers and slipped around the corner.

“What was that?” Ian croaked, eyes bugging out.

“That, Gallagher, is called flirting,” Mickey chuckled. “Let’s go find out where the _Don Benjamin_ is currently moored.”


	4. White Knight

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For Raine_on_me: True north strong and free, yo

I need a hero

I’m holding out for hero ‘til the morning light

 

The constant hum and vibration of the Cessna bush plane was lulling Mickey to sleep. It wouldn’t be a long sleep as the flight from Colón to Puerto Obaldia was only an hour, but he hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep since the redhead beside him arrived. Maybe he could close his eyes and shut the world out, including thoughts of Gallagher sleeping practically fucking naked on his old pea green chesterfield the last two nights.

He gave the redhead a sidelong glance and almost laughed at the way he was hugging that goddamn backpack to his chest like a lifeline. But then he remembered how he’d felt the first few times he’d been forced to fly in a single engine death trap and he held back his teasing comment.

A glance out the little window showed only white cloud cover, but Mickey knew in a short while, Ian was going to shit his pants if he looked out the window. The landing strip into Puerto Obaldia was short, bumpy and ended in the side of a mountain. It was fucking unnerving to see the mountain coming at you at nearly three hundred miles an hour. However, Mickey had made this trip many times over the years and trusted Guillermo with his life. The old pilot had spent his life doing this and had never fucking died. Good enough for him.

Again, his eyes slipped over to study Ian and he could see the man’s lips moving. If the way his eyes were squeezed shut was any indication, he was likely cursing out Lip in his mind to keep the fear at bay. Anger was a useful fucking tool for crowding out fear. And doubt. And panic. Fuck, even love. He knew firsthand that it can also be a destructive tool. It could take over a person’s mind.

Goddamn Lip and his schemes. This wasn’t the first time he’d dragged Ian’s ass into trouble. Probably not the last. Well, that’s if they found his ass in one piece.

 

 

After leaving Lip’s Subway conquest, Mickey had checked the Puerto Colón port call history on his fleet monitoring app and confirmed that the _Don Benjamin_ had left Colón 13 days ago and was currently in port at Cartagena, Colombia. It had stopped for a full day in Puerto Obaldia 10 days ago to deliver supplies and likely pick up more passengers who were reluctant to make the journey to Colombia on foot through the Darién Gap.

Ian had wanted to immediately go to the airport and book the first flight to Cartagena, but Mickey had other ideas. If they were going to find Lip, they needed to follow in his footsteps and his first stop was Puerto Obaldia. So they’d headed to Javier’s bar for a night cap. Less than an hour after they arrived, the old pilot had sauntered in to join his buddies at the bar. Mickey joined the old guys, buying a round of beers and bemoaning the last World Cup qualifier against Honduras.

When he’d returned to Ian a half hour later, they were set to take the morning mail run to Puerto Obaldia in Guillermo’s little five-seater Cessna.

They spent the remainder of the evening making sure they had supplies to see them safely through the jungle if it came down to that: picking up proper trekking sandals for Ian and sorting through Mickey’s first aid supplies, water purifiers, dried fruit and nuts, and weapons. Then packing everything into sealable plastic bags before loading up their backpacks.

Mickey nudged his dry bag pack with the toe of his heavy weight trekking sandals, hoping that Ian’s new shoes wore-in okay. He’d learned the hard way that a journey lived or died on the fucking effectiveness of your footwear.

All around them were packets, parcels and bags of letters that Guillermo would be delivering to the small villages along the Caribbean coast of Panama before returning home that day. If they discovered that Lip had not gotten off the _Don Benjamin_ in Obaldia, they’d catch a ride with Guillermo tomorrow back to Colón and head to Colombia by international flight. It would be faster than going by ship, which could take up to a week. But Mickey’s gut was telling him that Lip wanted to make his way by foot through the jungle. He hadn’t shared with Ian that a lot of people had never reached the Colombia side of the Gap. Disappearing forever somewhere in the lush landscape either at the hands of Mother Nature or the FARC guerrillas and drug traffickers.

The little plane hit a patch of rough air and dipped suddenly. Ian’s eyes flew open and he reeled back so hard when he saw the mountain in the distance that his backpack fell off his knee landing on a parcel labelled _tartar con cuidado_.

“Handle with care, man,” Mickey admonished, nodding at the parcel when Ian gave him a blank look. A stiff smile attempted to form on his lips, but the speed with which the mountain was heading toward them caused a shudder to wrack Ian’s body.

Mickey tapped his finger on the back of Ian’s hand to get his attention and said, “Your fears ain’t walls, just hurdles, man."

Ian looked intensely into Mickey’s eyes drawing on his strength like he always had. “Hurdles? Yeah, okay, right,” he breathed carefully. “Is that from the _Peaceful Warrior_ book I saw in your apartment?”

Mickey hesitated but then made a decision. “Yeah, that shit’s helpful if you really think about it. Your brain is your worst enemy sometimes.”

“It sure as hell is right now,” he agreed. Another deep breath. “What else does it say?”

“The warrior is right fucking here,” he tapped Ian’s chest then tapped the armrest. “Right fucking now.”

Ian wrapped his fingers around Mickey’s hand.

“Are you happy, Mickey?” he asked urgently.

“What does that even mean?” Mickey asked well aware that those words had been asked once before. “I guess I ain’t unhappy.”

“Good. That’s good,” he whispered, shifting his eyes back to the looming mountain. “It’s pretty fucking amazing out there. I’ve never seen anything even remotely like it. Ha! I’ve never travelled so that’s not really a surprise.”

The blues, purples and greens of the Darién Coast butting up against an almost fake looking jungle of trees and winding rivers filled the windows of the little plane. “Jesus, Mickey, this is what you see on a regular basis.”

While Mickey could still appreciate the mind-numbing beauty of the area, he also had a keen appreciation for the harshness and dangers such beauty presented. Much like certain other things that at first appeared spectacular and took your breath away but ended up hurting and nearly destroying you. 

“You can get us through that?” Ian asked in amazement, his fingers touching the plane’s window.

“On the fucking path, yeah. I didn’t suddenly become a bushman.” Mickey stopped there, refraining from sharing that the path could have its own dangers. The human kind. He could fight and shoot and use his street smarts against traffickers and guerillas, but he wasn’t gonna try to outsmart the jungle itself. He wasn’t a fucking fool.

When the taildragger landing gear hit the ground with spine numbing force, Ian’s fingers slid between Mickey’s and squeezed painfully. The plane shook and shuddered as the engine reversed in preparation for stopping and the rubber wheels bounced lightly on the newly paved runway.

Unable to hold back his chuckle this time, Mickey smiled at Ian’s attempt to stop the plane himself by pushing on the invisible brake in front of him. “Jesus fuck,” Ian prayed in southside fashion but overall found his inner warrior.

Once they came to a complete stop and Guillermo lowered the air stairs, Ian grabbed his backpack and made for a hasty exit, but his legs weren’t cooperating, and he stumbled over several bags of letters and nearly fell out the door. Mickey was starting to fucking enjoy this whole thing.  


 

Puerto Obaldia was essentially a village built around a military outpost and the last check-in before the massive fortress of wilderness. They’d need to get an exit stamp from the immigration office if they intended to head any further south and cross into Colombia by land. But first they needed to pick the brains of the locals, see if Lip had passed through or not.

Out on the runway, they were bombarded with locals wanting to see what mail was being delivered. When they saw Mickey, several pre-teen girls came rushing forward calling Mickey by name and hugging him fiercely. Ian watched as Mickey smiled and patted their backs awkwardly.

Dropping his backpack to the tarmac, he pulled out a small stack of what appeared to be teen magazines, if the grinning, heavily made up models posing on the cover were any indication. He passed them over in a secretive manner, and the girls tucked them under their brightly colored t-shirts with shrieks of joy before running through the wire gate toward the tiny village.

“Contraband,” Mickey shrugged, picking up his pack once more and heading over to Guillermo. They shook hands and exchanged a few words in Spanish, while Ian stood by nodding and smiling politely.

“Chao,” Mickey said and gestured for Ian to follow him through the gate. “So the most likely place to start is the Internet café. We don’t want to start asking questions at the immigration office yet. Official dudes are a pain in the ass the whole world over.”

“There’s an Internet café here?” Ian asked, his eyes scanning the dozen or so ramshackle huts and poorly constructed buildings, the missing windows or doors or roofs, the attempt to improve the situation with bright pastel paint.

“If there’s Internet and coffee, then we got ourselves an Internet café,” he replied crossing what appeared to be the town square. A grass patch with a swing set and a few benches centered among the buildings. “It’s the hot pink building.”

A Central American jungle style strip mall faced them: immigration/copy shop, Super Mas convenience store and on the end the aptly named Café Internet.

The inside appeared to meet the requirements with 4 computers set up at stations and a middle-aged lady in a bright red headscarf behind a counter refilling a small assortment of pastries under glass covers. “Mickey!” she exclaimed when they entered. “Ha sido un largo tiempo.”

“Sí, Selena, too long,” Mickey nodded and approached the counter. “Dos cafés por favor.”

Again, Ian was forced to stand back and watch Mickey charm information out of a woman. He still had his rough edges, but underneath it was a calmness that had never been there before. Ian could tell that when he looked at people, he was seeing them and they responded to that. With that knowledge came a flare of relief wrapped in a thick layer of jealousy. This was his Mickey; he was the only person Mickey allowed in. At least that was how Ian chose to remember it, keeping Mickey in stasis as the man who loved Ian rather than a man in and of himself.

As the two conversed in Spanish, Ian settled in at one of the computers and sipped the hot coffee. He logged into his email and checked for messages from Lip. His cell phone was all but useless at the moment with no cell coverage in the area. Plus Mickey was using it to show a picture of Lip to the café owner.

Eventually Mickey pulled up a chair beside Ian and gave him a recap of the conversation. “So, yeah, Selena remembers Lip and remembers that he was with another guy, also an American. Any ideas who that might be?”

“Did she say what he looked like?”

“Your height—way taller than me apparently,” he grumbled. “Brown hair slicked back, around our age.”

“That could be anyone really. I don’t know many people Lip hangs around with, or really what he’s been up to the last while,” Ian frowned in concentration. “That’s it?”

“Well, she mentioned that she couldn’t imagine anyone heading into el Darién in tight jeans and not regretting it.”

Ian blinked in surprise and an imagine popped into his mind. “Could it be Jimmy? Steve?” At Mickey’s blank look, he added, “Fiona’s ex. He spends time in South America doing illegal shit.”

“You got a picture?”

“Uh, no. But I got the Internet.” He turned to face the screen and typed in Jimmy’s name. After a few combinations, a Facebook photo of Jimmy on a yacht popped up. “Bingo.”

Mickey turned back to the barista and called out, “Yo Selena, this him?” She came around the counter and bent down to the screen. “Sí, pantalones apretado.” They grinned at each other.

“Tight pants?” Ian asked.

“Sí,” they both agreed.

 

They were sitting in Restaurant Caleta where Mickey ordered carimañolas and batido because he wanted them to fuel up before heading into the Darién. Ian balked at putting the foreign looking food into his mouth, but watching Mickey eat casually as though it were pizza and beer eased his doubts. The mostly bland pastry dish and milk based smoothie didn’t wow his taste buds, but they didn’t turn them off either.

Wanting to start their trek as soon as possible so they could arrive in the next town before sunset, Mickey was rehashing what they’ve learned while filling his mouth. “So Lip and Jimmy—that what we’re calling him?” He raised his eyebrows and tilted his head at Ian, who melted just a little at the sight, but eventually managed to nod. “Stayed here one night in the hotel 6 days ago, which means we are catching up to them.”

“Amazing, Mickey. You got us five days closer to them already,” Ian rested his chin in his hand and watched Mickey frown at him suspiciously. “Lip should have hired you as his guide.”

“Yeah, him and me trekking through the jungle would a ended really fucking well,” Mickey snarked and picked up the recounting. “Anyway, the two idiots stopped at the convenience store for snacks and made the necessary copies of their passports in the copy shop.”

Mickey finished his smoothie with a loud slurp. “Now, we need to chat with Dagoberto and see if they tried to find a guide through the Gap or whether they were planning to walk the coast on their own. We’ll find him down by the pier. He meets people who arrive by boat and helps them arrange whatever shit they need.”

As they made their way among the old cement houses toward the turquoise water that was peaking through the gaps between the buildings, Mickey turned to Ian with a serious look on his face. “You sure you wanna do this, Gallagher?” He pulled on his cigarette and added, “The fucking jungle ain’t like anything you’ve ever seen, man. It can fuck you up. Plus we don’t know what kind of trouble we’re gonna find once we leave this little bit of civilization. No fucking Internet cafés or smoothie bars that’s for sure.”

“I can’t turn back now, Mickey,” Ian exclaimed, but a tiny frisson of fear accompanied those words. “Are you okay doing this?”

“This is what I fucking do, man. It’s just another day at the office,” he explained with a wink. “But I, you know, have seen and done shit. This all could be a bit of shock to someone who’s been living clean.”

Ian turned to look at the dark-haired man confidently swaggering toward the coastal inlet and the line of blue skiffs attached to the pier, a cigarette dangling from his lips and blue eyes surveying the area.

“I’m not worried,” he decided. “I’ve got my white knight.”

Mickey eyed Ian through a haze of smoke. The corner of his lip creeped up slightly as he pulled the smoke from his lips. “I forgot my fiery steed.”

You’re all I need, but Ian kept that thought to himself.

 

 

After confirming that Lip and Jimmy had in fact hired a guide to take them to La Miel, the next town along the Comarca de Kuna Yala coastline about a 4-hour hike skirting the deepest part of the Gap, and that the guide hadn’t returned yet, Ian Gallagher and Michael Alexander returned to the copy shop and immigration office to make copies of their passports and get an exit stamp so they could enter Colombia.


	5. Fresh from the Fight

He’s gotta be strong

And he’s gotta be fast

And he’s gotta be fresh from the fight

 

The trail between Puerto Obaldia and La Miel skimmed the edges of the Caribbean Coast. The flat basin in which the winding trail began quickly gave way to a narrow path along a natural ledge carved into the mountainside. While the trail itself was wide enough for a vehicle, not even a fancy ass 4x4 would make it over the giant roots, uneven ground and overrun vegetation that made walking a challenge most of the time.

Ian was trailing slightly behind Mickey watching him swing a large stick at sprawling vines that were creeping across the trail. He could hear frogs burping and locusts rubbing their legs together. Thanks to Animal Planet he knew a couple of nature related facts, or the unfamiliar noises would be freaking him out.

“Hey Mick, you ever think back in the day, this is where we’d end up?” he asked wistfully, remembering their last night together before Mickey disappeared from his life.

“You dragging my ass into something against my will? Yeah, I could a predicted that.”

When the pebble hit the back of Mickey’s head, he chuckled. “Are we there yet?” Ian asked.

“It’s been like 20 fucking minutes, man. We got about three hours left and the goddamn sky looks like shit,” he complained with a sigh. “Every fucking time I walk this god forsaken path, it rains like a motherfucker.”

“Good thing we sealed all our stuff in bags,” Ian commented looking through the overhang of plants to the sky. A blue and yellow bird looked back at him. He blinked in surprise and tripped over a jagged root, knocking into Mickey’s back.

“Eyes on the ground at all times, Gallagher,” Mickey reminded him. “Rule number 2 of jungle 101.”

“What’s rule number 1?” Ian asked getting his footing.

“Bring a fucking gun.”

Ian smiled at Mickey’s back. “I think that’s your number 1 rule, period.”

“Good fucking rule.”

Despite the oppressive heat and humidity, Ian was feeling happier and lighter, being in tune with Mickey felt like nothing else ever could. He inhaled deeply to get air into his lungs after the trail’s incline increased, his nose filled with the scent of rotting vegetation, humid and heavy.

“How many times have you walked this path?”

“Too fucking many.”

“Why? Who hires you?”

“Backpackers, ecologists, criminals, occasionally the military. People with problems that need solved,” he added taking a long drink from the tube attached to his water bladder. “Drink water, man.”

After taking a drink as instructed, Ian asked, “You ever run into trouble out here?” He glanced around again knowing that somewhere, probably close by, were jaguars and pumas and big fucking snakes.

Mickey just laughed.

“What kind of trouble?” Ian moved just a little closer to Mickey.

“The most common kind a trouble. Human.”

Ian added guerillas and rebels to the list of dangers he was cataloguing. “How long have you been doing this?”

“Six years.”

“What did you do before that?”

“What’s this? Twenty fucking questions?”

Just then a piercing scream echoed out of the dense canopy to his right, and Ian jumped out of his skin, nearly bowling Mickey to the ground when he rushed to his side. “What the fuck? Is someone being killed out there?” he squeaked.

An amused grin transformed Mickey’s face. “Monkeys, Gallagher. They’re fucking everywhere, almost as bad as asshole ants.”

Now Ian was hyper-aware of each sound, his ears straining to discern each caw and buzz and snap. But it mostly felt like ominous silence crushing in around them. Unconsciously, he moved closer to Mickey so their arms occasionally rubbed against each other. His strength and calmness were reassuring.

They walked quietly for a couple of hours, hiking up and down as the trail wound its way further from civilization.

Just as they were beginning the decent into the low-lying area that would lead them back to the coast and La Miel, the rain started. Or the flood seemed more accurate in Ian’s opinion. First, he’d felt a cool breeze against his sweat slicked skin, and he’d halted his steps to enjoy it. Then a fat raindrop hit his face just as he heard Mickey curse.

“We gotta find cover, now,” Mickey announced, grabbing Ian’s arm to speed his progress. “There’s a bit of an overhang in the mountain up ahead.” But the last few words were nearly drowned out by the pounding of the rain as it was released with fury on their heads. Twice Mickey’s hand on his arm stopped him from falling flat on his face over the slippery roots weaving around the trail.

At the rocky overhang, Mickey pushed him beneath its protective cover until his backpack butted up against the mountainside. Then Mickey pushed his way under until his chest was inches away from Ian’s. They stood there dripping rain water from their hair, faces and clothes; shivering and panting from the onslaught; fighting their awareness of each other.

Ian’s heart was beating nearly out of his chest. He could feel it in his throat and it was making him swallow compulsively. The heart stopping fierceness of the storm and the heartbreaking closeness of this man had commandeered his senses, and he wasn’t completely sure he would able to stop his hands from sliding up Mickey’s chest, just once. Just to feel for a second the heat and hardness. He was looking down at the light grey t-shirt molded to that chest by the rain water and remembering once upon a time being free to touch him whenever he wanted. Would Mickey stop him now?

The shivering and panting weren’t lessening and now he needed to adjust his pants, without making it too fucking obvious. He tried a subtle shift of his hips, but Mickey made a small choking sound and Ian’s eyes snapped to his mouth. Those soft lips parted and warm breath brushed over Ian’s face just as a pink tongue slid across the bottom lip and pulled it back under white teeth, in what Ian was sure was slow fucking motion. Each frame sucking Ian’s will along with it. When the lip popped back out, moist and plump, Ian knew they were in trouble.

While the heavens opened up and thunder crashed around them, they stood under the overhang oblivious to any storm but the one inside their bodies. As though they were separate from his body, Ian’s hands found Mickey’s chest and his fingers pressed into the wet material, feeling the swiftly beating heart. He watched his fingers slide up and over muscle and bone, real flesh not fantasy. When Mickey’s Adam’s apple moved suddenly, Ian’s thumbs came up to meet it, pressing against it and the pulse on either side. The prickly hairs from Mickey’s beard rubbing against his fingers.

Mickey’s eyes closed but his lips parted, and the sight triggered memories of other times Ian had seen Mickey look just like this. So long ago. How had he gone so long without feeling this? How could touching someone’s throat be a thousand times more powerful than the entirety of a relationship. How was he going to survive the feel of Mickey’s lips?

Just as Ian began bending forward to bring their lips together, the rain stopped, and they were enveloped in deafening silence, which contrasted starkly with their emotion-laden bodies. What had felt natural in the midst of a swirling storm now felt exposed and raw.

 

 

Mickey snapped out of his daze first and stepped backward onto the slick path. A sharp shake of his head was all he could offer at the moment. He didn’t trust his voice or his mouth to not betray him. Or the rest of his body. His brain was the only part of him not fucking begging Ian to touch him, and it wasn’t exactly fighting tooth and nail.

“You must hate me,” Ian whispered. “I wouldn’t blame you. Sometimes I hate myself.”

“Are you snorting some of that coke Lip concocted?”

“My crazy shit.”

“What about it?”

“You know that wasn’t me, right?”

Mickey continued to back away from Ian surveying the path and looking at the clear sky. But Ian’s words triggered a new and different fury inside Mickey. He had replayed Ian’s last words to him pretty much every day since they’d parted ways. Sometimes he’d understood, sometimes he’d accepted, sometimes he’d fought tears, and sometimes like now he’d wanted to lash out and release the pent-up shit boiling in his gut.

“No, Ian, actually I don’t know. What isn’t you any more?” Mickey spat at him, enunciating each word and painting them with layers of venom. “This isn’t me, that isn’t me. Make up your fucking mind.”

“You know I didn’t mean any of that.”

“You didn’t mean what? Breaking up with me, laughing in my fucking face when I tried to help you, leaving me to rot in goddamn prison because it was too fucking hard to see me? Or telling me that standing beside me when I needed you wasn’t a good fucking fit for you?”

“I was messed up then, trying to figure things out, to stand on my own two feet,” he insisted. “But you left and never contacted me. Never gave me another chance. I never fucking heard from you again.”

“I wasn’t planning on staying away forever. But—,” Mickey stopped abruptly and looked away.

“But what?” Ian pleaded. “Why did you leave me for good?”

With a deep sigh through his nose, Mickey explained, “I went online once and saw pictures of you. With other guys. With boyfriends. I figured you really had moved on, so I fucking let you.”

“I only had boyfriends because I was trying to forget you.”

“I guess that’s the difference between us. I never wanted to forget you.”

Ian stepped forward, his hand outstretched and an intent look in his eyes, but just as he reached Mickey, the other man’s hand pushed into his chest to block his movement. “Don’t.”

The force of the push caused Ian to take a single step backwards and suddenly he’s gone. The ground beneath him dropped away and he plummeted down the side of the embankment. Mickey knew from experience that the jungle can envelope someone that fast, one minute there, gone the next. And leaving the trail is the worse idea possible: from fer-de-lance snakes to bullet ants to homicidal thugs, you just wanna get in and out not fuck around.

“Fuck,” Mickey spat watching Ian’s body twist and turn as it slid the thirty feet down the muddy embankment toward the river below. His blue gaze took in every alternative in a second flat, and he jumped down to the trunk of a fallen quipo tree landing on his haunches with a light thud. A tangle of liana vines was buried beneath the fallen tree, so he grabbed one in each hand and let his body skid down the embankment until the vines pulled taut. He was about 6 feet from the bottom of the gully, so he released the vines and jumped the remaining distance.

Ian pushed himself onto his knees amid a mess of crushed ferns, a slightly dazed look on his muddy face. Mickey stopped in front of him about to bend down and see if he was okay.

“Mickey! My backpack is gone. I think it flew in there,” Ian cried pointing to the rushing river beside them.

“Aw, fuck,” he groaned, immediately released the backpack straps from his shoulders. As soon as it thudded to the mossy riverbank, he yanked his t-shirt over his head and pulled his lightweight cargo pants down and over his sandals. Heading into the latte colored water with an exasperated splash, he was quickly swallowed by the water.

It wasn’t the first time he’d been in a jungle river, but he certainly hoped it would be his last. As much as he knew that piranhas were only interested in you if you were bleeding, he wasn’t fucking interested in meeting one. Plus who the fuck knew what else was lurking nearby. The jungle was a one seriously fucked up science experiment gone wrong.

He gulped in a slew of water when he saw Ian’s backpack caught on some kind of water lily root. With a jerk, it came loose sending both the backpack and Mickey up to the surface. He had travelled a distance from Ian, so he hooked the pack over his shoulder and with long, even strokes pushed against the current back to the bank.

Once his feet touched ground, he heaved a huge breath and dropped the backpack beside his. Ian was still kneeling and staring at Mickey in awe, “I thought you couldn’t swim. That was fucking amazing, Mickey!”

“I only couldn’t swim because I never went to a pool or whatever,” he muttered a little embarrassed. When he eventually met Ian’s eyes, he frowned at the blood running down his face onto the collar of his t-shirt. “Jesus, Gallagher, you’re fucking bleeding.”

Grabbing the first aid kit from his pack, he dropped to his knees in front of Ian and pulled out a packet of antiseptic wipes. The cut on his cheekbone wasn’t deep, but Mickey pressed the wipe against it for a minute to stem the blood flow. He tried to keep his eyes trained on the cut, but the pull of Ian’s eyes was so strong, he got drawn in a couple of times.

To refocus his attention, Mickey glanced down at the blood on Ian’s shirt but noticed a second stain forming along his ribcage. “Take your shirt off,” he ordered. This wasn’t gonna end well, he thought watching Ian’s t-shirt slide up and over his head.

Mickey lowered himself to his heels and peered at the 2-inch slice in Ian’s side. He could feel Ian’s eyes watching as he gently wiped the skin around the cut to see how deep it is.

“It doesn’t look too deep,” Mickey said. “You still an EMT?”

At Ian’s nod, Mickey showed him the first aid kit. “Butterfly closure or Nu-skin?”

Ian talked him through the process, his hand making its way to Mickey’s hair gently running his fingers over it. Mickey pretended not to notice, not wanting Ian to know how much he missed this kind of gentleness. He hadn’t really had much since they kissed good-bye at the border. He’d been shown kindness a few times and he’d kissed a few dudes, but never was there any real affection in those touches. Other than Ernesto, he hadn’t had anything even remotely close to love in ten years. Which until seeing Ian again was really not that big a deal. He’d not really had much before Ian, so it was a familiar state.

When Ian’s fingers slid lower to trace over the name engraved in Mickey’s chest, he swallowed hard and stopped himself from pulling away in shame, embarrassment or regret.

“All done,” Mickey said, returning to his knees and bracing himself for what he knew was coming. Talking about what they both wanted to do but shouldn’t do. Sure enough, the moment his eyes met Ian’s, he could see the question there. The need and want he was sure was mirrored in his own eyes. Without waiting for Ian to bring it up, he said what ultimately needed to be said.

“Of course, I wanna fucking kiss you, Gallagher. Hell, let’s be totally honest, I wanna fuck you like I’ve never wanted to fuck anybody in my life,” he confessed in a harsh voice. “But then what?”

He stared at Ian, “Well, cat got your tongue, man?”

“I—don’t know,” Ian acknowledged.

“Well, man, I do know. I really fucking know.” He pushed quickly to his feet but rather than move away like he planned, he looked down at Ian—on his fucking knees in front of him. “Fuck,” he moaned, close to tears in the split second between looking down at Ian and knowing he was no longer capable of saying no. He squeezed his eyes closed and waited to see what Ian would do. It was all up to him now.

Warm arms came around his shoulders and pulled him in, holding him tightly. A warm nose tucked into the spot where his neck met his shoulder and sniffed deeply. A warm chest pressed against his own and he felt their hearts beat against each other. “I missed you so fucking much,” Ian whispered into his skin.

A second or an hour later, Ian pulled away and stepped around Mickey. “It was fucking genius of you to put all our shit in plastic bags. My passport and phone would be ruined,” Ian said loudly forcing a brightness on the situation. Mickey could hear him rummaging in his backpack, so he turned around to grab his clothes.

“My smokes better be fucking dry or Mother Nature is gonna hear about.”

 


	6. Someone, Somewhere

Up where the mountains meet the heavens above

Out where the lightening splits the sea

I could swear there is someone, somewhere watching me

 

“Holy shit, Mickey,” Ian’s awed voice carried over to Mickey as he whacked a palm frond out of his face with his walking stick. He looked in the direction of Ian’s gawking and caught a glimpse of the bay of La Miel through the wall of palm trees. His first reaction was thank god the walk was nearly over, but then he looked at it through Ian’s eyes and remembered seeing a breathtaking beach for the first time. It wasn’t how he’d hoped he see it, with Ian by his side, but it had still been more amazing than any picture he’d seen.

“Come on!” Ian grabbed his hand and pulled him forward and down the narrow, winding path.

When they reached the white powder beach, Ian dropped his backpack to the sand and kicked his shoes off heading straight into the blue green waves. Mickey sat down on the sand and lit up a smoke watching with a small smile on his face. He could cross one more thing off his bucket list, he thought while swiping a thumb over the side of his nose.

Ian had tried to roll his pant legs up but, of course, they were too tight to really get anywhere, and he gave up quickly just letting the water rise up his legs as he splashed around in the crystal-clear water like a fucking five-year-old.

Occasionally, he’d call out to Mickey about something he could see in the water, but Mickey just sat and watched. This was an almost memory that had played out in his mind so many times, he just wanted to sit back and enjoy it.

When he finished his cigarette, he laid back against the warm sand and stared up at the endless blue sky squinting against the sun. Ernesto had drilled into his head that _the time is now, the place is here, stay in the present_. Mickey had his eyes closed and was chanting that reminder when droplets of salt water landed on his face. He opened his eyes to the sun being blocked out by a smiling face.

“Where you talking to yourself, Mick?”

“Yeah, I’m such a great conversationalist, I can’t help but be interested in what I have to say.”

Ian’s eyes lit up even more, and he plopped down beside Mickey to try to clean some of the sand off his feet and put his sandals back on. “We gotta go now?” he pouted.

“The border dudes shut down shop at 4:30 and don’t reopen until they feel like it in the morning. If we don’t cross, we’ll have to sleep on this side of the border and the rooms are shit and the showers non-existent. You need a fucking shower,” he smirked, then sat up to grin at Ian. “There’s a bit more ocean on the other side of the border. We ain’t gonna run out.”

Ian jumped up and grabbed his backpack. “Race you to the top!” With that he took off toward the winding concrete steps leading up to the official border between Panama and Colombia.

 _The time is now_.

 

At the top of the footpath, Ian scanned the endless horizon amazed that the ocean could feel so calm and inviting when it was actually a powerful force that could easily destroy. It wasn’t the only thing around here that could do that. He glanced over at Mickey, chatting with the young border official. Mickey had offered him a cigarette, and they were laughing about god knows what, something in Spanish. Mickey’s gun was sitting on the small wooden counter attached to the front of the border control “hut”. He’d presented his carrying permit and passport and was once more flirting information out of someone.

At least, it looked like flirting to Ian. The handsome, dark-skinned official was smiling a big toothed grin, and Mickey was looking up at him with a tilted head and his hands were stuffed in the pockets of his cargo pants. Definitely, flirting.

After a few minutes, Mickey motioned him over and he presented his passport to the uniformed man who wrote his name and number in a small notebook. “Bienvenidos a Colombia.”

“Ah, gracias?” Ian mumbled still feeling awkward with the one Spanish word he felt compelled to use.

As they made their way down the stairs on the other side of the bluff, Ian kept his eyes on Mickey’s ass the whole way. The image of him walking out of the river after rescuing his backpack had planted itself in his mind and was not going anywhere. The wet skin, the defined shoulders, the strong legs, the clinging boxers and his name written on his chest like he belonged to Ian.

He closed his eyes, thinking that would block out the memories but all it did was make them easier to access. Mickey running his hand over his hair to whisk the river water off then shaking his head dramatically from side to side as his hands moved down his body…was most definitely something he did _not_ do, but something that Ian’s mind added for the pleasurable effects…before he tripped over the lip of the step and stumbled into Mickey.

“Jesus Christ, Gallagher, it’s like I’m taking a newborn fucking giraffe through the jungle.”

“Sorry,” he grumbled, but secretly he was planning his next opportunity to trip so he could grab Mickey’s bicep for support again. “Did you learn anything about Lip and Captain Tight Pants?”

Mickey was quiet for a minute, but Ian couldn’t see his face so he wasn’t sure what it meant. Once they reached the bottom and made their way along the path to the town, Mickey pulled him off the path to the white _Bienvenidos Bahia Sapzurro_ sign to stand beneath a waving yellow, blue and red flag. “They didn’t cross the border,” he said quietly. “Officially.”

“Wait! What?” Ian demanded starting to panic. “Then why the hell did we?”

“They crossed the border from in there,” Mickey nodded to the mass of green beside them: green plants, green trees, green shrubs, green weeds. Ian had seen what “in there” meant from the seat of the Cessna that morning.

“Oh my god.”

Mickey gave a little shrug, which he accompanied a moment later with a matching little nod. “Pretty much.”

“How do you know they’re in there?” Ian asked dropping his voice low and leaning in close.

“Well, they walked into the jungle the same way we did from Puerto Obaldia. How many ways out did you see?” Mickey lifted his eyebrows in expectation. “Border, ocean or jungle.”

Ian nodded thoughtfully. “How do you know they didn’t take a boat?”

“The only spot they could board is where you were frolicking with the fishes and that’s under surveillance, so people can’t skip the border easily. They don’t just let people hop on a boat and row around the border,” Mickey explained. “That leaves the fucking jungle. Which is under zero surveillance.”

Together, they stared at the overwhelming tangle of vegetation. “We’ll never be able to find them in there,” Ian croaked out and the easy contentment that had been evident in his face the last couple of hours leaked out until his shoulders slumped. “Fucking impossible.”

Mickey chuckled. “Shit, Gallagher, this is nothing. It doesn’t even register on the impossible scale. I know what’s fucking impossible, man. This is stupid and dangerous, yeah, but not impossible. All we need is a plan.”

“A plan?” Ian perked up a little at Mickey’s easy tone, and he remembered all the impossible things that Mickey gave the finger to over the years: coming out to his father, Ian’s bipolar condition, federal prison, life as a fugitive. Fuck, his confident determination was sexy as hell, and Ian wanted to kiss him so badly he felt a little weak in the knees. “Do you have a plan, Mick?”

“Sure, we don’t look for them; we get them to look for us.”

 

The village of Sapzurro, tucked into the Bay of Sapzurro, was a relatively quiet Caribbean community of about 300 people. Mickey had been here dozens of times, coming and going, delivering people or goods safely, so he knew the lay of the land and who was who. He knew who he needed to chat up to get word out that he was looking to meet.

He pushed the bold blue front door of the Picadaras sports bar open and swaggered into the dim square room. He had a cigarette between his fingers but it wasn’t lit. Even in the middle of fucking no where, smoking was prohibited. What was the world coming to?

The late afternoon sun peeked through the tinted window and motes of dust floated around the room. Mickey eyed the inhabitants of the room sitting at tables or at the long wooden bar. Six in total, five male. The sole female carrying a tray of empty dishes.

She smiled at Mickey. “Jack Daniels?” At his nod, she added, “Dos?” He was starting to get predictable.

Sitting down in one of the five bar stools, he tapped his unlit cigarette against the bar top and glanced toward the _Solo Empleados_ sign on the door behind the bar. As he waited for Essie to return from the back to pour his whiskey, he sorted through possible angles to take in the upcoming discussion. They needed to know if Lip was alive and whether he was being held against his will. He knew Ian wanted to take his brother home with him, but Mickey figured the guy was old enough to make his own decisions and he may not be finished his business here.

But Ian needed to know what was happening, and Mickey was going to get some answers, so he could let Ian go. Again. The sooner the better. The longer they were together the harder it was going to be. Like a Band-Aid, it just needed to be ripped off.

He’d told Ian that it would go easier if he visited the bar alone as the people he needed to talk to wouldn’t trust a new face. After the two of them had registered at the Hostal Marlin, cleaned up and grabbed a sandwich, Ian headed down to the dock with the food and a couple of beers to wait for the sunset and Mickey’s return.

Now Mickey was chewing his inner cheek a little in indecision. He knew the fastest way to get to the heart of the matter was to use Ian’s copy of the formula and advertise that they had it. However, Mickey hadn’t shared that idea with Ian because he suspected the redhead wouldn’t go for it. It was their secret weapon and he needed to play it right.

If they just tried to make contact with one of the drug manufacturers in the area, it could take time to hook up with the right person. But if they waltzed in with a copy of the formula, they’d be taken straight to the source. That would get them in. Then what?

They could give the formula up in exchange for the release of Lip and, possibly, Jimmy. That assumed that Lip and Jimmy were being held against their will and that they would willingly go, risking losing a shit ton of money in the process.

Mickey didn’t really give a single fuck if Lip walked away as poor as when he’d started, but he knew that money made people do shit they might not do otherwise. Would Lip give everything up because Ian arrived demanding it?

Essie pushed through the employee door and grabbed two shot glasses from the drying mat. Flipping them over, she topped them off with golden liquid and slid them over to Mickey, her long ridiculously painted nails tapping the bar next to Mickey’s shots. "¿Algo más?"

“Yeah, I need to talk to him.” He switched to English to keep their conversation between the two of them.

“Talk?”

“I got something he might be interested in.”

“Surprise? He don’t like surprises.”

“He’ll like this.”

She hummed a little and pulled the handle back on the draft beer spout filling a glass. As she took a long swig from the glass, her nearly black eyes bore into his, so Mickey picked up a shot and tipped it back. “He’ll be back tonight,” she decided.

 

After finishing his second shot and leaving some cash, he made his way through the village toward the bay. Other than a couple of motorcycles used to move goods between the villages along the coast, there weren’t any motor vehicles around, which created an unnerving calmness that sometimes Mickey found relaxing and sometimes fucking future apocalypse kind of unnerving.

As he approached the water, he could see both the edges of the sunset and Ian’s silhouette outlined against the setting sun. His senses were so heightened that he was experiencing the smells and sounds of the ocean as though it were the first time.

Mickey walked along the pier until he was standing beside Ian, who was sitting on the edge, feet dangling in the warm water. Their sandwiches and beer were laid out beside him next to his sandals.

“How many shades of orange can you see?” Ian asked waving his hand toward the sunset.

“Eleven,” Mickey replied in all seriousness. Ian turned to look at him. “I counted once.”

Mickey watched as Ian lifted his finger to the sky and started counting. “I keep losing track.”

“Trust me, man.”

Ian just looked at him for a long moment then unwrapped their sandwiches. Mickey kicked his sandals off and sat down accepting the food and beer bottle.

They ate in silence watching the sun slowly disappear beyond the horizon. Ian pulled a slim silver-plated container from the pocket of his jeans. It was engraved with his initials and held a small selection of pills. “From Fiona.” He showed Mickey the engraving. “In case anyone forgets whose fucking pills they are.”

“You need a matching flask,” Mickey suggested. “That’ll definitely need your initials on it.”

“My birthday’s coming up.”

“I’ll keep it in mind.”

“I’m so tired,” Ian groaned now that they were finished eating. “I may pass out right now, but I want to finish watching the sunset.”

Mickey slid over until his thigh was touching Ian’s and he wiggled his shoulder a little. Ian rested his head and let out a contented sigh. “You did good today,” Mickey commented. “A lotta shit happened and you stayed pretty cool through it all.”

“Just another day at the office for you, huh?”

“Beats punching the clock.”

“Ha! How would you know? When did you ever punch a clock?”

“I didn’t cross the Mexican border and wind up here. Had to work my way up to this here career.”

“Really? What did you do when you crossed the border?”

“Drink.”

“You got drunk?”

“Yeah, for about a year.”

Ian turned his face until it pushed into Mickey’s shoulder. “Then I got a job cleaning rich guys’ pools and trimming palm trees.”

“Mickey, the pool boy?” Ian laughed and rested his chin on Mickey’s shoulder.

“It didn’t turn into a porno even once. Just picking up fucking leaves all day. But I didn’t mind it actually. Kinda relaxing.” When Mickey turned to look at him, they were so close they could feel each other’s breath.

“How long did you do that for?”

“Couple years.”

“Why’d you quit?”

“Ernesto died. It was time to move on.”

“I’m so sorry Mick. Did you love him?” he asked quietly, but Mickey heard the twin emotions of sympathy and jealousy between each word.

“Yeah, I guess,” he hesitantly replied. He could let Ian stew in the ideas he was thinking, or he could let him off the hook. _The time is now._ “He wasn’t my fucking boyfriend, Ian. He was my mentor, I guess. Like a councillor or fucking guru.”

“Yoda?”

“Yeah, exactly.”

“You were Luke Skywalker, then?”

“Uh, I’d say more like Han Solo,” Mickey lifted his eyebrows. “You’d be Luke Skywalker or Princess Leia.”

“Fuck off.” But they both knew it was accurate. “Well, she was pretty fucking awesome. Kicked Han’s ass.”

“Exactly.”

“So you had a guru, huh? Teaching you how to be a peaceful warrior? What else does it say in the book?” Ian asked keeping his eyes on Mickey’s.

He knew the contents of that book inside and out, but being so close to the one thing he’s always wanted but let go of ever having, his mind was stumbling to remember.

“There are no ordinary moments,” he finally said. But what he thought was no moment with you has ever been ordinary. Ian’s cheek resting on his shoulder wasn’t ordinary. Their thighs pressed together wasn't ordinary. The heat in his face and along his spine weren’t ordinary.

Partly for himself and partly for Ian he added, “Life unfolds as it pleases, so surrender is the most intelligent response we can make in every moment.”

He lifted his hand to Ian’s cheek and traced his thumb along the cheekbone just below the scratch, until it reached the corner of his mouth. When Ian’s mouth opened slightly and his head turned, Mickey’s thumb pressed fully against his lips. Then downward over Ian’s bottom lip. He could feel the slight wetness as the pressure parted Ian’s lips further. Once his thumb reached Ian’s chin, his mouth was open enough for Mickey to lean forward and slide his tongue inside.

He didn’t mess around with sweet, light presses of lip on lip; he scraped his tongue along Ian’s then swirled it around until Ian’s tongue was in his mouth and his hands were grabbing at the front of his shirt.

Mickey pushed Ian back until he was laying against the wooden boards of the pier. His hand cushioned Ian’s head from the hard surface, while his other hand slid under his shirt and up his back pulling him closer. The feel of Ian’s warm skin against the palm of his hand was almost as intoxicating as the taste of his mouth. He used Ian’s hands grabbing at his dark hair to anchor himself. Never once did their tongues separate after waiting so long to be together.

The sea breeze swept over them, the surf chased the beach, the sun set completely but neither man noticed. They didn’t notice the giggling girls sharing a joint as they walked along the sandy shore; they didn’t notice the ruddy ground dove land and capture the crust from Ian’s sandwich.

They just continued to kiss while Mickey drew Ian’s chest up against his; they kissed while Ian gripped Mickey’s ass and brought their hips together; they kissed even though they were breathless and panting and their hands were yanking at each other’s clothes.

They kissed until Ian said I love you.

 

Later that night Ian laid in his twin bed in the hostel’s private room beneath the mosquito netting, trying to arrange his body so that any available air movement would alleviate the heat enveloping his body. He kicked himself figuratively. He’d kick himself literally if he could reach his ass. God, how did he always push Mickey too far too fast. Why could he never control his needs where Mickey was concerned?

They’d fucking kissed and it was like a kiss from a goddamn romance novel. Long lost lovers finally reunited beneath the setting sun on a tranquil beach. That’s probably why he felt compelled to sharing his feelings.

It wasn’t like it should have been a surprise to anyone. He’d loved Mickey for almost 15 years and it showed no signs of letting up. He also knew that while Mickey had loved him pretty much that whole time, some of the time it was against his will and not in his best interest. Hell, maybe most of the time.

Now it was after midnight and Mickey was out meeting some drug lord or something to help him find Lip. He had dragged his ex-boyfriend’s reluctant ass into yet another situation that wasn’t in his best interest, and then Ian had repaid him by forcing his feelings on him, feelings that he knew Mickey was trying to avoid. Just like old times.

And just like old times, Ian was going to spend the night fantasizing about having Mickey for himself while the real Mickey was out of his reach. He’d lay here until he heard the door open and close and the squeak of the bed beside his. He’d lay here concentrating on his chin where the skin had been rubbed raw by a beard and the ache in his boxers that had not been rubbed at all.

Or he could get up and see for himself what the hell was going on.


	7. Larger Than Life

He’s gotta be sure

And it’s gotta be soon

And he’s gotta be larger than life.

 

“Michael.” The seductively warm voice came from a pair of lips that could make a man weep if his mind wasn’t elsewhere. “I’ve missed you.”

“Uh, yeah, same here,” Mickey mumbled and brought his cigarette up to his mouth, as a shield from the hot fucking Colombian pouting at him.

“Why don’t I believe you, bonbomcita?” Sebastián asked, dipping his head a little so he could look at Mickey through his thick lashes.

Mickey wanted to ruin that pretty face every time he called him some ridiculous pet name. Fucking “little candy” was about the limit of his patience. But he had a job to do tonight and it didn’t involve fucking up any part Sebastián and that included his goddamn chiselled face.

When he’d arrived back at the sports bar to find the drug dealer seated at a table with a group of grizzled old sailors, some of whom Mickey recognized as ship captains, Mickey ordered his usual two shots and settled in at a table by the window to wait. After a half hour of watching Sebastián prance and preen around the bar, Mickey needed a smoke. Only fucking tobacco would make it possible for him to endure another sultry look from those golden cat eyes. No motherfucker should be given that many goddamn mouth watering physical traits. Sebastián had enough for a dozen dudes. And for some mysterious fucking reason, he had a thing for Mickey.

Now Mickey was standing outside the bar, eyeing the lone empty street in Sapzurro and sucking on his cigarette like it owed him a debt. So when Sebastián joined him and proceeded to call him by this new term of fucking endearment, he knew he had to suck it up.

“Hmm?” Sebastián asked, deliberately pressing the tip of his tongue to his upper lip. “You know what I like to do with candy, don’t you?”

Fuck. Mickey stopped himself from pressing his thumb and forefinger into the base of his nose like he wanted. Instead, he tried out a smile, his face cracking from the lack of practice. “I recall,” he managed to spit out.

“So do I,” Sebastián said stepping closer. He smelled like musk or earth or some shit that was kinda pleasant to the nose. Essentially every one of Mickey’s senses were having a field day: his nose, his eyes, his skin, all remembered that Sebastián felt and tasted as good as he fucking looked.

But it didn’t matter because his brain simply wasn’t interested. Before Ian had shown up, his brain was only mildly interested in the Colombian, but now he just wanted to get this shit over with. So he licked his lips and swallowed hard to gear up for some fucking flirting.

“You missed me, huh?”

Sebastián laughed and closed the distance between them, his body heat invading Mickey’s personal space. “Every night.”

“Fucking liar,” Mickey actually laughed at this, goddamn professional flirt.

“You underestimate your appeal, chiquito,” he cooed.

“Can’t say the same for you, man,” he chided but added a cheeky grin. God help him.

Draping one well-defined arm over Mickey’s shoulder, the tall golden-skinned wet dream asked, “Are we going to talk all night or are you coming back to my place?”

 

Ian made his way along the plank sidewalk with only the moonlight to guide him, and partially regretted his impromptu decision to go looking for Mickey. Knowing he was gonna be pissed at Ian if he found out, he was kind of just wandering at this point. He’d been up the street once and found lights on in a few different buildings, but didn’t want to barge in and surprise Mickey, especially if he was in the middle of something important.

Just as he concluded it was time to head back to the hostel, he saw the front door of a bright blue boxed shaped building open and a dark haired, bearded man exit. He already had a cigarette in his hand and had it lit before the door closed behind him. Ian watched from across the street as he took a pull on the cigarette like it was a long-lost lover. He smiled at that. Nobody could make a cigarette sexy like Mickey could.

Glancing around, Ian took a step into the street but paused when the blue door re-opened and another man stepped out. This man was everything Mickey wasn’t: tall, lean, golden, graceful. Ian could feel his mouth drop open a little at the sight of him from the five o’clock shadow to the dark curls framing his face to the jeans stretching over rock hard thighs. There wasn’t much to not look at.

Then his eyes shifted back to Mickey and his heart tripped around in his chest. He was his own kind of beautiful: formidable, bold, fearless, vulnerable.

And FUCKING flirting again, the motherfucker!

After kissing Ian nearly into a fucking coma, now he was cuddling up to this runway model and that looked like a fucking smile on his smug, stupid face. Holy shit!

When the man put his arm around Mickey’s neck, Ian stepped completely into the street, fully intending to make a scene the likes of which Mickey had never seen. But then he remembered that he was a thirty-year-old man not an emotional teen and he stopped. Before he could return to the shadows, he met Mickey’s eyes. They narrowed slightly, then shifted back to the sculpted face of his fucking boyfriend. Ignoring Ian completely.

So he stomped off in a huff but a silent huff at least. Instead of turning toward the hostel, he headed toward the pier. The last place he wanted to be was in a bed alone fantasizing about Mickey because this time the fantasies would be interrupted with images of the hottest fucking man in South America giving it good to Mickey. Which added fuel to all the flames burning inside Ian including the one in his pants. He stomped his feet even harder.

The moon cast white light across the bay, and the tide lazily rolled up to meet the toes of Ian’s sandals as he arrived at the shore. His brain was battling itself and he was fighting hard to maintain his irrational anger. How dare Mickey say he was going to work on a plan to bring the drug traffickers to them, but make a quick pit stop to get laid? His blood was starting to boil again because it especially fucking hurt that Ian was totally willing to be the person who got Mickey off but he chose to go somewhere else.

Shit! Maybe Mickey had a fucking boyfriend. At that heart destroying idea, he started to pace down the shoreline toward the rocky ledge crumbling into the bay. He was so caught up in his mental gymnastics that he didn’t notice the three little lights several yards out to sea.

 

When Sebastián’s lips touched his, Mickey turned his head just enough that they slid to his cheek. That didn’t stop Sebastián from running his tongue along his skin. “Uh, man, I’m here on business,” Mickey said but added, “first.”

“Business before pleasure?”

“Yeah, whatever, sure,” Mickey was starting to get impatient and more than a little concerned that Ian was going to do something stupid because if anyone could get himself into trouble in a deserted coastal town in the middle of the night, it was him.

Mickey’s eyes softened and his lips tipped up at the edges at this thought, and Sebastián smiled back, satisfied that he finally had the other man’s proper attention. “What is this official business that my long absent lover wishes to discuss?”

“I’ve come across some interesting reading material,” Mickey began. At Sebastián’s playful smile, he continued, “A formula.”

Sebastián’s demeanour changed, every line of his body tensed. The soft, Spanish lover became a hard, Colombian drug trafficker. “¿Qué?”

“A magic fucking formula that is supposed to be the next fucking thing in drug manufacturing.”

Sebastián looked at him harshly. “Where is it?”

And Mickey returned the look with the same level of tenderness. “None a your fucking business.”

“I will be looking forward to taking my anger out on your ass later,” he spat.

“Enough of the tender poetry, Romeo. I wanna meet with the General.”

After extracting Sebastián’s reluctant promise to text him where and when to meet, Mickey took off toward the pier where he suspected Ian was headed. In a huff. In a wonderful, beautiful Ian Gallagher huff. He could feel his step lighten a little as he made his way down the path toward the beach. He was gonna razz the hell out of him about what he thought he saw in front of the bar.

As the path opened up to the sandy beach, his senses came to life. Something wasn’t right. He stepped into the overgrown vegetation lining the path and scanned the shore. Voices drifted up to him and what sounded like a struggle, grunting and a muffled shout. He pulled the 9mm Ruger from its place at his lower back and pushed through the underbrush.

 

Ian was slipping between outright indignation at being treated like a sack of potatoes and paralyzing fear at being treated like a sack of potatoes. What had he done now? Less than an hour ago he was safely thrashing around on his bed reliving an epic make out session with Mickey. Now he was being kidnapped by some Colombian smugglers who were barking commands at him in Spanish.

The zip tie around his wrists was painful even without pulling against it and the sack over his head was limiting his air supply. Probably the only thing keeping him from completely freaking out was that this wasn’t the first time in his life that he’d been in this situation. Mickey had prepared him for this when he had him kidnapped after his prison escape. Who knew that experience would come in handy?

He stumbled a little as he was pushed forward and cursed at. Well, he thought it was likely a curse by the tone of voice. It didn’t sound anything like the almost tender exasperation Mickey used when he called him a newborn giraffe.

At this thought, his nerves evened out a little. If he could be found, then Mickey would find him, of that he was certain.

The group of men made their way along a barely defined path through the rainforest. Unable to see, Ian was constantly tripping over roots and jerking at the feel of branches and vines hitting his body. He could feel tears forming in his eyes and he wanted to cry at how quickly he was tiring out because of the humid air under the burlap material. All he wanted was one deep breath of fresh clean air; he wanted that like life.

Eventually, just as he felt his legs turned rubbery, the men stopped and he crashed into the one in front of him. With an elbow to the gut, he fell backwards to the ground landing harshly on his wrapped hands, the zip tie cutting into his skin. He just sat there using the opportunity to rest his shaky legs and try to tilt his head to allow some air flow.

Again, he could hear voices around him but couldn’t understand a word they were saying. There was scuffling and grunting, like they were dragging heavy items around as the voices moved away from him and back again. He couldn’t tell for sure, but it sounded like at least four different male speakers.

He’d briefly seen two of them in the moonlight back at the beach before he was pushed to the ground and his face shoved into the sand. They’d been on the young side, younger than him and were wearing worn looking army fatigues.

Too soon, the voices were hovering above him and he knew they were talking about him. Even without understanding the actual words, he knew they weren’t happy about his presence. God, what if they decided to just shoot him and get rid of his body. He had visions of a gun being lifted to his head right then. 

 

When Mickey saw the rifle being lifted toward Ian’s head, he almost shot the motherfucker holding the gun in his forehead. He’d had his Ruger cocked and ready, his finger on the trigger. But the oldest of the four idiots standing around Ian had held up his hand in an exasperated gesture, then pointed to one of the field huts set up in the clearing.

As they men discussed Ian’s fate, Mickey quickly took in everything he could about the men and the camp. They’d walked about a mile into the dense jungle, but followed a clear-cut path west the entire way. The clearing was large enough for the three simple wood structures, each padlocked and windowless. A fire pit and folding chairs were set up in the center, and Ian was currently sprawled near the entrance to the path; his head was hanging between his shoulders, but he appeared to be mostly unharmed.

The four men standing around Ian were dressed in well-worn, but official, fatigues of the Colombian paramilitary, and the Mauser model carbines slung over their shoulders were also army issued weapons. But this did not look anything like official army business. This was most definitely drug trafficking, which wasn’t unheard of in the Colombian army, but not on this small a scale.

Was this operation part of a larger one or just a small group of jack-offs trying to get started? Mickey needed to get Ian out before he discovered the answer, but he also needed to know if this camp and these men could lead him to information about Lip. He fucking knew that Ian wasn’t going to agree to just walk away even after being kidnapped and held at gunpoint. Ian wasn’t leaving without Lip and Mickey wasn’t leaving without Ian, so here we are.

After a few minutes of bickering, the men decided that keeping Ian alive for the time being was the best idea, so the one with the death wish grabbed Ian’s elbow and pulled him up roughly. Mickey could tell it was painful as Ian’s full weight was digging into the plastic tie at his wrists, and he made a mental note to teach the son of a bitch a lesson in manners before he hauled Ian to safety.

At the door to the smallest hut, the guy who appeared to be in charge pulled a set of keys from the front pocket of his cargo pants and unlocked the bolt. Ian was essentially tossed inside and the lock was snapped closed.

Two of the men sat down in the folding chairs settling in for what looked like a nap. The third remained standing most likely assigned first guard duty and the fourth headed back into the path toward Mickey.

Perfect.


	8. Fire in my Blood

Through the wind, and the chill, and the rain

And the storm, and the flood

I can feel his approach like a fire in my blood.

 

Ian’s knees hit the dirt floor with a thud that jolted all the way up his spine, and he toppled forward onto his belly. The itchy woven material covering his face scratched and suffocated causing him to briefly panic. But he quickly realized he was alone and could get the sack off his head without raising any flags.

Rolling around until he was on his side in a way that allowed him to sit up without the benefit of his arms, he eventually made it to his feet where he could bend over and shake his head enough that the sack slid off.

He stood up so fast that the room began to spin, and he fell backwards once more onto his bound hands. Laying there with what felt like blood running down his hands and a throat so dry he could barely swallow, Ian focussed on breathing. Moments ago that was all he wanted, fresh air. Now that he had it, he wanted more. He wanted his hands free and he wanted fucking water.

Even with his eyes wide open, he couldn’t see shit in the room. Obviously, there was no light source and there didn’t appear to be even a window allowing in any moonlight. Although he wasn’t sure there would be much moonlight as he knew by the bumpy trail they had walked that they were somewhere in the Darién Gap.

The panic started again. Even if Mickey saw him walk off toward the beach rather than the hostel, how would he ever know where to go from there? He wasn’t a fucking magician. He was just a man, a pretty fucking spectacular man, but still just a man.

 

Crouched in the underbrush a few feet off the path hoping like a hell a fucking snake or some shit wasn’t planning to pay him a visit, Mickey watched the scrawny soldier unzip his pants to pull out his dick. As soon as the heard the stream of piss hit the ground, he silently stood up and brought the butt of his pistol down on the kid’s skull just above his right ear making sure the impact was hard and direct. He crumpled immediately into Mickey’s waiting arms, the stream of urine soaking into the green and brown of the dude’s still open pants.

Once they were hidden in the bushes, Mickey quickly ran his hand along the kid’s body checking the contents of his pockets. The first thing he found was a bundle of cable ties, which he slid into the pocket of his cargo pants after using one to tie up the other man, making sure to pull extra hard on the end. Hurt Ian and pay, motherfucker.

He also found a pack of cigarettes which made its way into Mickey’s pocket. What he didn’t find were any keys. He was gonna have to get those off the leader. Placing his pistol in the small of his back, he slung the kid’s rifle over his shoulder and stepped back into the path. He wouldn’t have long before the guy woke up and started shouting at his comrades.

 

Ian remembered that his cell phone was still in the side pocket of the shorts he’d put on, what felt like a year ago when he’d headed out to find Mickey. If he could reach his bound hands around and access his phone, he could at least have some light if not cell service.

But no amount of wiggling got his hands anywhere near his thigh even when he bit his lip to keep from moaning in pain at the pressure on his wrists. Shit, what now?

Okay, what if he could get his shorts off? Then he’d definitely be able to reach his phone. This turned out to be doable once he stood up and leaned against the plank wall. After getting them over his ass with his bound hands, he was able to shimmy out of them until they landed softly on the dirt floor.

This little bit of success felt like a fucking epic achievement, but he stopped himself from getting too far ahead. He thought about Mickey’s book, about staying in the moment and focussing on what was happening now.

What was happening was that he needed to get back on the ground to reach his pants to check for cell coverage.

 

Once again crawling around in the underbrush, Mickey found a palm-sized rock and tossed it near the side of the hut where Ian was being held. As it landed with a soft thud on the mangled ferns, the head soldier on watch looked toward the sound. He glanced at the sleeping men sprawled in the lawn chairs and then toward the path the kid had disappeared down. Bringing his rifle around into his hand, he walked slowly toward the hut flicking on the flashlight in his other hand.

Mickey watched the light make circles on the ground until the soldier reached the back of the hut. With his back to Mickey, he paused not seeing anything out of the ordinary.

Now or never, thought Mickey. He leapt from this hiding spot, landing on the man’s back and immediately knocking the flashlight to the ground as he staggered under Mickey’s weight. Before he could call out for help, Mickey dug his fingers into the solid tendons of the soldier’s neck seeking out his esophagus. Once he found it and gouged with all his might, the guy let go of his rifle to bring his hands up to Mickey’s in an attempt to pull them off. Mickey’s thighs were clamped around his hips for all he was worth, and he wasn’t letting go of the guy’s throat until he was either unconscious or dead, whichever came first.

It didn’t take long for the pressure on his airway to bring the soldier down. As he started to pitch forward, Mickey dropped his feet to the ground and used the grip on his neck to bring him softly to the earth. Unsure whether he had met his maker or not, Mickey tied him up anyway, and once he had the keys and flashlight, turned toward the two sleeping soldiers.

 

With his cell phone illuminating the hut, Ian could now see that the room was about the size of his old bedroom growing up and about half of it was filled with—cans of asparagus?

The stacks of cardboard boxes had _producto de Colombia_ stamped on them in black ink and beneath that _espárragos_ , which he might have assumed meant asparagus if there weren’t a few cans sitting out on display helpfully clearing up any confusion.

Well, whatever they were doing around here, it wasn’t fucking legal that much was for sure.

He continued shining his phone’s screen around the room until he found the door. With the cell in one hand, he tried turning the door handle with the other hand but it didn’t budge. Shit, it was worth a try.

The panic was building again. All he had to work with was four walls, one locked door, hundreds of cans of asparagus and a cell phone he couldn’t see because his hands were tied behind his back.

“Focus, Ian,” he said out loud. His voice was a little raspy and kind of freaked him out as it echoed slightly in the confined space. But it took his mind off, well, his mind. “What next?”

Check your phone, he thought. Refraining from answering out loud and entering a full-blown conversation with himself. How?

He couldn’t see the phone in his hand no matter how he contorted his neck. Crouching down until he could drop the phone on the dirt floor, he hit the _on_ button at the top of the phone before releasing it.

Standing back up he slipped his sandal off and touched the screen with his big toe. Jesus, he had to enter his fucking password, but it looked like maybe there was on bar on the cell coverage icon. Could that be possible in the middle of the rainforest? Even drug runners needed internet, he supposed.

Focussing all his attention, he tried hitting the little 2 on the number pad and a 3 popped up. Sniffing loudly, he forced the tears back into their ducts and tried again. He got a 2 and nearly shouted with joy.

As sweat developed all along his back, he was focussed so intently on his phone that he nearly had a heart attack when he heard a voice shout, “Hands up, motherfuckers!”

“Mickey?” he whispered in astonishment. Then louder, “Mickey.”

Moving toward the door, the light from his phone’s screen disappeared at the same moment he heard a gun shot.

“Mickey!”

In pitch black again, he walked into the door with a grunt then pressed his ear to it, listening for any hint that Mickey was alive. Oh god, could this really be happening? It all suddenly felt like a dream that he would wake up from. Was he really locked in a shed in the rainforest wondering if Mickey was dead?

Now, he did let the tears slide out of his eyes because he couldn’t hear anything on the other side of the door, which felt cool against his cheek so he focussed on that sensation. He’d learned to do this in his therapy sessions. Focussing his senses to turn his attention from thoughts that were destructive.

Instead he pictured Mickey looking at him through a cloud of cigarette smoke and telling him he knows what’s impossible. Mickey sitting beside him on the pier and explaining that there are no ordinary moments. Then he remembered being afraid during the flight in the small aircraft and Mickey saying that fears are hurdles not walls.

Right, okay, he could keep it together. He didn’t know if Mickey was hurt, but he also didn’t know how to help him even if he were. Turning back to his phone, he figured he could continue to do what he’d set out to do.

Only to hear the padlock being removed from the door latch.

 

Mickey dropped the padlock to the ground and pulled open the door, shining the flashlight into the enclosed space of the hut. The light landed first on the word _espárragos_ printed on the side of a stack of cardboard boxes, then swept over bare legs and up to Ian’s face. Then down again to Ian’s dick.

“What the fuck, Gallagher? Where are your pants?” he asked feeling a laugh form in his chest. Then the idiot was colliding with his chest and pressing his face into his shoulder. A tremor rocked Ian’s shoulders and Mickey brought his free hand up to his back. “Hey.”

Ian continued to breathe into his shoulder until Mickey pulled back a little. “We gotta go, man,” he said trying to tilt Ian’s head back up to make eye contact. “Let’s get your hands free, okay?”

He brought the Leatherman skeletool out from the side pocket of his cargo pants and gently turned Ian around. Blood was dried around the edges of the zip tie, so he was extra careful when slipping the mini wire cutter between Ian’s skin and the plastic tie. After snipping the tie, he gently pulled it away from Ian’s wrists.

“Now let’s get that ass covered up. Where are your pants?” He kept his hand on Ian’s lower back while flicking the light around the room until it landed on a pair of khaki shorts and an iPhone. Leaving Ian briefly, he stepped forward to pick up the items.

When he turned back, Ian was rubbing his shoulders and staring wide-eyed at Mickey. “I thought you were shot.”

“Nah,” he replied holding the shorts out to Ian. “The dipshit thought he’d go for his gun. I gave him an incentive to sit the hell still.”

Ian had his shorts on but was fumbling with the button, so Mickey gripped the flashlight between his teeth and fit the button through the hole himself. “You gonna be okay to walk, Ian?”

“I thought you were shot.”

The air left Mickey’s chest in a sigh. “C’mere,” he said quietly. He wrapped his arms around Ian and pressed their lips together. After a moment, he pulled back enough to tuck Ian’s hand into his and bring it to his chest. “Feel that? It’s still beating, but, man, it won’t be for long if we don’t get the fuck out of here. Ya gotta pull yourself together.”

Ian nodded vigorously. “Okay. I’m sorry. I’m really fucking sorry.”

“I know. Now grab a couple of those cans of asparagus.”

Ian picked up two cans and looked thoughtfully at them. “I don’t think they’re really asparagus.”

Mickey just laughed as they made their way out of the field hut and past the two men sitting on the ground, hands tied to each other. He lifted his finger to his lips in the universal “shh” gesture and tapped each man on the head lightly with the muzzle of the assault rifle in his hand. They glared up at Mickey but kept their mouths closed.

As they made their way toward the dark jungle path, Ian ran his finger through the loop at the back of Mickey’s army green combat pants. He was gonna need a lifeline to get him back to civilization.

 

Three hours later, they were on the _Maximiliano I_ , a 30 foot panga that skirts the shore between Sapzurro and Capurgana delivering people and cargo between the two villages. Captain Oliver was piloting the boat, and Mickey and Ian were sitting in the back row behind a group of groggy backpackers who were discussing the serious lack of coffee options in the village. It was making Mickey agitated that he didn’t have a coffee or a fucking cigarette.

They would be in the next port town in little over a half hour, but Ian had managed to fall asleep within minutes of pushing out to sea.

His head was resting in Mickey’s lap and he was the next thing to unconscious. Staring down at the sweet face in his lap, Mickey was trying to live in the goddamn moment and not project into a future that hadn’t unfolded yet, but fuck. He couldn’t see any way that the future he wanted could become the future he’d get. Ian was gonna go home, the one place Mickey couldn’t go. He was gonna have to say good-bye yet again.

Ian twitched and mumbled something, but the weight of Mickey’s hand in his hair relaxed him enough to fall back to sleep. With the long, lush coastline on one side of him and the dots of the San Blas islands on the other, he tried to let the beauty and the spray of cold salt water distract him.

He was fucking tired himself. The walk back to Sapzurro from the smuggler’s hideaway was long and tedious, and Mickey had practically carried Ian the last 100 feet because whatever adrenaline he’d been running on had run the fuck out. They’d crashed for two hours before Mickey’s alarm woke them up, so they could catch the first boat out of Sapzurro. He wasn’t sure when or where Sebastián would arrange for him to meet the General, but he wasn’t taking any chances that Ian’s red hair would make him a target for the smugglers if they’d managed to get free and came looking him.

They’d just have to wait in Capurgana for word about the meet. And Mickey figured if they were going to be hanging around a romantic seaside town that maybe the time actually was fucking now for him to surrender. After all, he had a few more items on his bucket list he wanted to cross off.

 


	9. Wildest Fantasy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For RedStarFiction: Happy Easter, Baby!

Somewhere after midnight

In my wildest fantasy

 

They pulled into Capurgana Bay just before 9 am, and Captain Oliver guided the panga to the shore alongside about a dozen other boats. In fact, to Ian’s eyes which were just blinking open, the whole bay looked like a game of Battleship with various sized crafts from motorized canoes to 50-foot yachts anchored or moored haphazardly. But this just added to the magnificent view.

He couldn’t believe he had slept the whole way here and missed the coastline completely. Looking at Mickey, who had jumped out to help the captain pull the small boat onto the sandy shore, he figured having his face pressed into Mickey’s lap made up for missing the view. He was still bagged from too little sleep and too much adventure.

The last few years of his life have been marked by quiet predictability, a novelty where Gallaghers are concerned. As he looked back on his life from this vantage point, he decided he had not been unhappy, but he had also not been completely happy either.

“Grab our packs, Gallagher,” Mickey called out to him, a cigarette between his lips. Ian watched him walk up the beach deep in conversation with the captain, who was headed toward a small clapboard building with official looking signs posted on it.

When he reached Mickey, Ian waited a few feet away until the men finished their conversation, although he could have been standing between them and not understood a word. What he wouldn’t give to have used his spare time to learn Spanish.

With a nod to the captain, Mickey turned to Ian and took his backpack from him, but as they moved toward the narrow cobblestone street, Mickey put his hand on Ian’s back to help guide him toward the line of colorful buildings advertising food, lodging and snorkeling gear. Ian kept walking as though nothing was out of the ordinary, but inside he was freaking the fuck out.  

The three-minute walk to the hostel was almost more than he could bear. His back was practically sizzling where Mickey’s hand rested even after he removed it to buy a few bottles of water and some energy bars from a street vendor, tucking most of them in the side pockets of Ian’s backpack.

As they stood waiting for the hostel staff to help them, the sensation in Ian’s back was replaced with the feel of Mickey’s leg pressed up against his. This time Ian did look down at Mickey, he couldn’t help it. The swing of a backdoor drew Mickey’s attention, so Ian didn’t get to search his face for answers.

Once Mickey arranged a bed and Ian pulled cash out of his backpack, they made their way to the foot of the stairs leading to the dorms. Ian started up the steps, but Mickey’s voice stopped him. “I’ll be back in a few hours. Meet me down here at noon.”

“What do you mean? No, I’ll go with you. Whatever you have to do, I can help,” Ian was starting to panic, his words tumbling out.

Mickey pushed him up the first four steps until they reached a landing. His hand slid up Ian’s neck and around the back of his head. Their eyes met and Mickey pulled their lips together. “Shhh,” he whispered into his mouth. “Get some more sleep. You got swim trunks in that bag of yours?”

Ian shook his head, but smiled a little at the idea of needing swim trunks.

“Okay, I’ll see you at noon.” With that he was gone.

 

Ian woke up alone in the 12-bed dorm mostly refreshed. He had thought he’d lay in his bed fretting over where Mickey was, why Mickey was touching him almost possessively and, of course, how the hell they were going to find Lip, which seemed to be spending less time in the forefront of his thoughts than he actually thought it should. But it was hard to erase the images of Mickey opening the door to the field hut like the four soldiers, unconscious and tied up, were no big deal. What was easy was believing Mickey would find Lip.

He could feel something like hero-worship forming in his mind, and he was pretty sure it was well founded. Lip would be lucky to have Mickey save his ass. Even though Ian was sure Lip was going to be pissed right off that he was sticking his nose in this. Then he shouldn’t have sent him the goddamn formula and expected Ian to just wait around for a message that he was okay.

At ten minutes to noon, he hustled down the stairs to meet Mickey, who was sitting in a plastic chair on the front sidewalk of the coffee shop next door. When he saw Ian, he pulled swim trunks and a tank top out of the bag on the ground beside him and told him to run back up to change.

Back down on the sidewalk, Ian grinned at their matching outfits: striped boardshorts and tank tops. Mickey’s black tank featured a baby-faced unicorn with an attitude and the caption: _I will cut you_. Ian’s white tank featured a zen-looking unicorn in lotus position and the caption: _Namaste_.

“I think we should trade shirts,” Ian mused. “We’d be ironic.”

“I ain’t wearing a shirt about yoga, man.”

“But you’ll wear a shirt with a unicorn on it?”

“Yeah, look at him. All badass and ready to stab fucking idiots with his fucking face,” he looked affectionately down at the scowling adolescent unicorn with a knife taped to the end of his horn. “Reminds me of myself as a young man.”

“And this,” Ian asked pointing to his chest, “reminds you of me?”

“Sure. He’s all gangly fucking legs and red mane of hair. Perfect.”

Laughing, they headed toward the dense rainforest, the sea at their backs. “Where are we going?” Ian asked.

“Heaven,” Mickey replied giving Ian the side eye and eyebrow lift.

Ian thought he was about as happy as he could get until they turned off the cobblestone walk onto a well-worn footpath heading into dense vegetation. Then Mickey took his hand and linked their fingers together. Ian basically floated for the next 10 minutes consumed by their physical connection and the humid, relaxing rainforest.

When they passed a blue hand-painted sign that said _El Parque el Cielo_ , Ian asked what it meant and Mickey told him _Heaven Park_. The moment he saw their destination, Ian reached over and planted his lips on Mickey’s. “It really is.”

“You happy?”

“Yes,” he squeezed their fingers together. “Can we go in now?”

“Gotta put some sunscreen on those fucking shoulders first, man.”

While Mickey rooted around in the bag of swim gear for sunblock, Ian took in the dozen or so waterfalls, some no taller than him and others a few stories high. There were vines hanging from the trees ready for swinging into the pools of water. People were floating in the pools, sitting on rock ledges and climbing up the embankment to get higher into the waterfalls.

Mickey tapped him on the arm with the tube of sunscreen, but Ian looked at him blankly. “I can’t reach properly. I might miss some areas.” With that comment, Ian pulled the tank top over his head surrendering his milky white skin to the sun’s rays and Mickey’s hands.

Pursing his lips a little to hold in his smile, Mickey squirted cream into the palm of his hand and moved to stand behind Ian. His hands were tentative at first, but Ian could tell the moment the warmth of their combined skin became more than sunscreen application. Mickey’s hands slowed a little and his thumbs massaged small circles into the flesh under Ian’s shoulder blades, moving lower until they reached the band of his swim trunks.

Eventually, Ian looked over his shoulder and found Mickey staring up at him intently. “Your turn?” Ian asked.

“Uh, sure,” he replied and passing Ian the tube of lotion, he pulled his shirt off. Ian’s eyes landed on the self-inflicted tattoo on his chest. He wanted to run his fingers over the letters, then his lips. He wanted to tell Mickey that he was under his skin too. But Mickey turned around and Ian’s eyes filled with tears.

Another name was tattooed into Mickey’s skin but this one looked professional. _Yevgeny_. It was situated in about the same position on Mickey’s shoulder blade as Ian’s name was on his chest. Ian did reach out this time and run his fingers over the name. Fuck, he could feel both Mickey’s sadness and his own personal loss.

The life they almost had.

Ian made quick work of Mickey’s back after that. If he dwelled for any amount of time, he’d have said or done something super emotional and ruined everything again. Dropping the tube back into the open bag, he announced, “I wanna start by swinging into the water!”

For three hours, they fucked around in the water, out of the water, swinging, swimming, floating. They stopped briefly for cold tacos that Mickey had picked up, but that was the only break. Ian’s nose was turning a little red by they time they decided to head back to town, where Mickey left him once again at the foot of the stairs to his dorm room and told him to be ready and cleaned up for supper in an hour. And to bring all his stuff because he wouldn’t be staying here for the night.

  

This time when Ian returned to the sidewalk outside the hostel, Mickey wasn’t there yet, so he lit a cigarette and leaned against the orange clapboard building. His hair was still a little damp from the shower and curling around his ears, which he hated. But the humid air made it impossible to tame anyway. He was back in his original outfit of rust colored jeans and navy short sleeve button down, the only clean clothes he had.

Stepping forward to butt his smoke into the mosaic planter, he almost stumbled into the fichus plant when he spotted Mickey walking toward him. Technically, he didn’t know who it was for split second, but when he did clue in, his heart fucking dropped from his chest to his gut and landed in his groin.

Holy shit! He’d shaved. Clean. His smooth cheeks were shiny from the close shave, his blue eyes shiny with affection, his smile forming at Ian’s look of astonishment.

“Fuck, I forgot how good looking you were,” Ian announced when Mickey stopped in front of him. “Hiding behind that beard.”

“I look like a fucking baby without it,” Mickey complained. “But I wanted to look presentable tonight. Got a fucking haircut too.” He ran his fingers over the neat black hair slicked back from his forehead.

“And clean clothes,” Ian ogled the snug fitting Levi’s and sleeveless lightweight hoodie. All his assets were on display tonight.

“Yeah, I’m squeaky clean all over.”

“Everywhere?”

“Yep.”

“Can I smell?”

“Seriously?”

“Very serious.”

Mickey tilted his head slightly to the right making room for Ian, who bent forward until his nose was hovering over his neck. He inhaled. Deeply. Until his stomach growled.

“I’m starving,” Ian whispered, pulling away. “I can’t wait to eat.”

“You done sniffing the fucking menu?”

“I was thinking about licking the fucking menu.”

“We better get some food into you then,” Mickey replied. “Italian okay with you?”

Ian would eat a can of cat food if Mickey presented it to him for supper tonight.

 

Seated at a square table in a corner of the outside patio of Il Cavatappi, they ordered beer, ciabatta and an antipasto plate to share. Ian’s senses were a little overwhelmed. The patio was likely the most beautiful place he’d ever seen: it overlooked the ocean and he could hear the constant roar of the tides. Above them was a wooden canopy layered with flowers and greenery. The breeze gently soothed his sun kissed skin.

But mostly, it was sitting across from Mickey is such a relaxed, adult setting. He paused with an olive partway to his mouth. “Oh my god, this is our date!”

Mickey smiled at him and the smile reached every part of his soul. “’Bout fucking time, too.”

Ian lifted his beer to tap it against Mickey’s. “No fucking kidding.”

Don’t you dare cry, Ian, he scolded himself. “You sure know how to show a guy a good time. You got a lot of dating experience?”

“No.” Mickey gave him an eye roll as if to say, “don’t be stupid”.

“What about that babesicle back in Sapzurro? The one with his hands all over you.”

“Babesicle?” Mickey chuckled, obviously enjoying himself.

“Yeah, Mr. GQ.” Ian narrowed his eyes a little.

“What about him?” Mickey rolled some prosciutto around a chunk of Gorgonzola and popped it into his mouth with a little more gusto than Ian felt it warranted.

“You guys—?” He wiggled his fingers a little to indicate something that he couldn’t bring himself to say out loud.

“Yeah.” Shrug.

“Wow,” he breathed. “Is he as—?” Again with the finger gestures directed at various body parts.

“Yeah.” Shrug.

“Wow.” But now Ian could feel his self-confidence drooping. He was like Mickey’s backwoods childhood crush not a worldly playboy who could stop traffic with his face alone. His self-destructive train of thought was stopped by the feel of Mickey’s finger rubbing against his knuckle on the table between them. Ian looked up and swallowed tightly.

“But he doesn’t make my heart pound,” Mickey explained, smiling. The word _tender_ came to Ian’s mind and he thought he might actually melt into a puddle of goo.

“Um. Has anyone ever made your heart pound?” Ian asked, feigning ignorance.

“Just one asshole I knew a long time ago.”

“Do I know him?”

“Probably. He got around.”

Ian kicked him under the table, but took the well-placed hit with graciousness.

Mickey winked at him and asked, “Anyone ever made your heart pound?”

“Only you.” He ripped off two chunks of ciabatta bread and handed one to Mickey. “Pound. Ache. Break.”

“Same,” Mickey looked down at the bread in his hand, his throat dry. He took a long swig of his beer before asking, “Are you single, Ian?”

“For four years,” he answered in a strong, clear voice. “I live with Lip now, but for awhile I had my own place, which I could afford because I made supervisor at work.” He dipped his bread in the balsamic vinegar.

Mickey nodded. “I was pretty fucking proud of you back then. It actually made it easier to accept that you didn’t come with me. I got why you’d wanna stay after building something for yourself.”

Ian wanted to keep the conversation light, so they didn’t detour into any topics that would put an end to the soft, easy comradery they’d established, but he knew there were too many landmines to avoid them all. He sat forward resting his arms on the table and his chin in the palm of his hand.

“So you crossed the border, got drunk, cleaned pools, read spiritual books and pulled ninja shit in the rainforest. That about cover everything?”

“Basically, yeah.” Mickey mirrored Ian’s position, but instead of resting his chin in his hand, he covered Ian’s hand with his turning it over to reveal the lacerations where the zip ties had rubbed his wrists. He traced his thumb pad over Ian’s raw skin, back and forth. They stared at their hands, breath shallow.

“How’d,” Ian cleared his throat. “How’d you meet Ernesto?”

“He ran a halfway house for men. I fit right in.” Mickey smirked a little. “I was basically an ex-con using alcohol to get me closer to the end. Pretty much the motto of the place.”

“Should you be drinking now?”

“I was never an alcoholic. I didn’t need to drink cause I needed to drink. I drank because it made me oblivious. As soon as I had a reason to not need oblivion, I didn’t need to get drunk. But I still love alcohol. She’s my mistress.”

Ian dropped his other hand to cover Mickey’s, so their four hands were tangled together on the table between the jar of parmesan and the tea light candle in a glass dish. Would Mickey freak out if he leaned forward and kissed him? But Ian reminded himself that this was Mickey’s date.

“Ernesto sounds like an amazing person.”

“He helped a lot of sad fuckers, that’s for sure. Never met anyone like him and I am probably here because of him.”

“I will be forever grateful.”

“Me too.”

The server arrived, and Mickey ordered them Spanish coffee and tiramisu with two forks. After she left, Ian brought the conversation back to Mickey’s past, which was still too much of a mystery.

“How’d you wind up in Panama?”

“Spend time in a port city and learn quickly that the city exists to keep the port going, so that’s where the work is. For awhile, I worked as a line handler on ships moving shit along the coast between Mexico and Colombia. Hated being out on the fucking ocean all the time, so first chance I got, I started moving shit on land and it’s fucking hard to get shit between here and any major city, so this seemed like the perfect location for my new business venture.”

“From fry cook to CEO?”

Mickey laughed. “Yeah. I got some money stashed in a Swiss bank account.”

“You do?” Ian’s eyes widened in wonder.

“Nah, it’s in my mattress. Don’t trust those banks.” Mickey was looking intently at Ian, and Ian knew he was thinking about the time they had been in a bank together and the money he’d left behind in the car.

“I can pay you back.”

“Fine. But then I insist on paying you your going rate for finding a missing person,” Ian smiled broadly. “What’s your rate for safely getting someone through the Darién Gap?”

“Five hundred dollars a day.” Mickey returned the smile.

“Your rate for saving someone from drug smugglers?”

“One thousand dollars.” His smile was growing. “Plus expenses of course.”

“That seems a little low. My life is worth more than that.”

“Yeah, but those four were a bunch of clowns, not real smugglers. Didn’t even break a sweat.”

“Fair enough,” Ian replied in a business-like manner. “I’ll expect an itemized invoice upon completion of our business transaction.”

He held his hand out to Mickey, who shook it but didn’t let go.

  

Cabaña Villa was located on the edge of Capurgana within walking distance of the bay. The walk from the restaurant provided another opportunity to hold Ian’s hand, which for Mickey was a novelty that he didn’t realize was missing. They smoked and sauntered along the main boulevard and through the coconut palms, stopping only once to squeeze in a little necking, where Ian’s hand found its way to Mickey’s ass and Mickey’s eyebrows found their way to his hairline.

When they arrived at the cabana Mickey had rented, he stopped at the low table on the front patio and pulled his phone from his pocket. Two solar torch lights provided soft lighting, making the tiled patio warm and inviting. Scrolling through his music, Mickey figured a little mood music would fit nicely with the mood lighting. As he thumbed through a bunch of soft Spanish songs, Ian stepped behind him and rested his chin on his shoulder to watch him scroll.

When the raspy chords of the song began, Mickey pressed his back slightly into Ian’s chest, and Ian slid his hand under Mickey’s shirt to rest on his belly just above the waistband of his jeans. Dropping the phone to the table, Mickey closed his eyes and focussed on all the places they were touching.

It was amazing that one person could hold the key to everything, to your heart, your body, your mind. It was also fucking scary, as scary at 31 as it had been at 16, and Mickey felt suddenly immobilized by it. He wanted to turn his head until his ear was pressed against Ian’s mouth, to feel his breath and tongue on that sensitive spot. He wanted to reach his hand behind Ian’s head so his back arched, begging Ian to move his hand up and over his abdomen and chest. He wanted to rub his ass against Ian’s hardness until he yanked his jeans down and pushed himself inside Mickey.

But he was frozen.

That’s the thing, though, with someone holding the key, they knew you and Ian knew Mickey well, at least in this way. His mouth did find Mickey’s ear and his lips pressed into the soft skin behind it. His hands did move over his abdomen and chest, caressing each contour, returning to Mickey’s hips so he could pull them tight against his body.

No longer frozen, Mickey’s body took control and he pressed himself against Ian, his cheek, his back, his ass, his hands, anywhere he could. He rolled his hips, letting Ian know he wanted him hard, that he wanted him to fuck him.

Ian turned him around, so they could connect their mouths and bodies, needy and frantic kissing and grinding. Ian was saying something, but Mickey couldn’t concentrate enough to make sense of it. “What?” he panted, sitting down on the end of the lounger and pulling Ian to kneel on either side of his thighs.

“We should go inside,” Ian said, leaning down to reattach their lips. His suggestion forgotten as quickly as he made it

“Take your shirt off,” Mickey grunted. His hands were already under Ian’s shirt, but he wanted his mouth there too. Ian shifted up to his knees and reached behind to pull the shirt over his head, providing Mickey with easy access to his target, smooth, flat abs.

Wrapping his arms around Ian’s hips, he pulled him close enough that he could push his face into the skin above his jeans and breathe him in. His tongue poked out to taste the skin near his belly button. It tasted so fucking good, he continued his exploration around the other side of the sweet little indent. “God damn, I want to fucking lick you everywhere.”

Ian was wiggling and shifting and pressing himself tighter against Mickey’s face, his hands were in Mickey’s hair and they were trying to bring him closer even though no room existed between the two of them. “Okay,” Ian breathed.

Mickey laughed into his belly then looked up into Ian’s face while he brought his hand around to feel the cock straining against form fitting jeans. It was hard and full and everything Mickey wanted in the moment. Because it was attached to Ian. “I need you to fuck me right now.”

Ian stopped thrusting his hips against Mickey’s hand in order to reach down to the button on his jeans, “Okay.”

“Maybe we should go inside?” Mickey thought that was a promising idea, but not something he was actually capable of accomplishing when Ian moved his hand to lower his zipper right in front of his face. “Jesus, man.”

Ian’s hand slid inside his jeans and his hips rock forward into his open palm; his other hand dug into Mickey’s shoulder for support as his head fell back a little. Mickey was mesmerized. And fucking hard.

“Ian, I need something inside me now. Your tongue or dick or something. Right fucking now.” And Ian’s tongue was there pushing into his mouth with enough force to knock them back on the lounger. He jabbed into Mickey’s mouth mimicking the act they both wanted.

Mickey’s hand shoved under the band of Ian’s boxers, wrapping around that beautiful fucking cock. He pumped it a couple of times before he’d had enough and, with a somewhat harder tug, pulled it and Ian up the lounger until he could wrap his lips around every inch he could reach.

The both moaned, Ian loud and throaty, Mickey rough and muffled, but they heard each other loud and clear and it was just too much. Mickey sucked once more, and his tongue traced each ridge and indent as he pulled away.

“Inside, now.”

Ian leapt off of him and yanked on his hand to get him off the lounger and into the cabana. The door slammed behind them.

In a frenzy to get his jeans off, Ian was hopping around on one foot and then other. “You got stuff?”

Watching him from the doorway, Mickey wanted to fucking weep at how completely whole he felt. Back when Ian was first sick, Mickey had called him his partner, lover, family because he didn’t know how to describe what Ian meant to him. He still didn’t, but he knew that those three areas of his life had been barren since they’d said good-bye at the border. Until now. In less than 3 days all his loneliness had vanished.

“Mickey?” Ian asked gently, concerned. When Mickey just continued to stare at him, he moved forward until his naked body was pressed against Mickey’s clothed one. Ian’s hands moved over the curve of his back until he reached the bottom of Mickey’s hoodie, then he slowly and carefully pulled it over his head.

With their bare chests pressed together, Ian slid his fingers between them to tug on the snap at Mickey’s waist. He lowered himself to a squat as he pulled Mickey’s pants down, so he could step out of them. Standing, he walked them to the bed, and Mickey knelt on the flowered comforter waiting for Ian to come up behind him.

He let Ian take care of him, of them. His hands knew how to open Mickey up; they knew what he liked. Mickey just relaxed into it, trusting Ian in this way like he always had. Ian kept his hands and his lips busy while he settled over Mickey, finally, finally, penetrating him.

Mickey wrapped his arms around the pillow beneath his face and used it like an anchor as his body was worshipped by his lover. His fucking partner, he thought as they finally came together.

 

A quiet thwacking of the ceiling fan was the only noise in the room for several long moments. The movement of the fan blades fluttered the white netting around their bed and moved the air enough to keep the oppressive heat at bay.

Ian had collapsed on top of Mickey and they’d rolled to their sides, sated for the moment. Eventually Ian lifted their laced fingers so he could see them better. “When did you remove your tattoos?”

“Not too long after I got to Mexico. I got picked up for disturbing the peace, so to speak,” he snorted a little but didn’t share the details of whatever memory this brought up. “Anyway, the cops were trying to figure out who the fuck I was cause I wasn’t much help to them. Later, I realized they were searching based on my tattoos, so I figured they had to go.”

“I barely recognize you without them.”

“Yeah, took me awhile to not freak out that some else’s hands were grabbing my dick when I was taking a piss.”

“I really don’t want to discuss anyone grabbing your dick ever again.”

“Not even me?”

“Nope, I’ll follow you to the can and hold it for you.”

“Kinky. But okay, it’s all yours.”

They let the implications of that envelope them, while Ian’s hand went to work.

 


	10. Beyond My Reach

Somewhere just beyond my reach

There’s someone reaching back for me.

 

Mickey awoke to unease. Tapping his phone screen, it came to life: 3:47am. He placed his hand on Ian’s lower back, which was exposed, the thin sheet pooling around his hips. His eyes travelled around the shadows of the room; the fan was lightly whirling; the curtains were flapping with the breeze from the fan and the open window. Those were expected noises, what had woken him was unexpected.

He rolled out of bed, grabbing his pistol from the drawer in the beside stand and his jeans off the floor, then moved silently toward the thin rattan door. Certain that what had woken him was the door handle jiggling, he listened intently and was rewarded with a scraping noise. Someone was trying to pick the lock.

Pulling back the hammer on his Ruger, he grasped it firmly in his right hand and yanked the door open with his left, pushing his pistol into the face of the intruder. “The fuck, Sebastián?!”

“¡Joder!” Sebastián brought his hand up to grab the gun from Mickey, while veering to left, but Mickey was faster. He lowered the gun to avoid the grabbing hand, then brought his foot to the side of Sebastián’s knee with enough force to bring the man to his knees.

Mickey returned the gun to Sebastián’s face. “If you fucking do something stupid again, I will unload this goddamn gun into your ridiculous face.” He didn’t sound so much angry as highly annoyed, so Sebastián got to his feet but kept his hands raised in front of his chest. The mini snake pick and tension wrench he was using to pick the lock were on the floor, and Mickey eyed them then gave his intruder a glare.

“Mickey? What’s going on?”

Both men turned to the voice coming from the bed. “Oh!” Sebastián said in surprise, his eyes raking over the redhead in the bed.

Ian was sitting up, blinking his sleepy eyes at them and rubbing his naked chest absentmindedly. He looked like a slightly confused fucking sex kitten woken after a night of debauchery. All warm and soft and entirely too bangable with Sebastián in the room.

“Cover yourself up, for Christ sake,” Mickey admonished him even though he knew it sounded ridiculously possessive considering Ian was a grown man and Mickey was half naked himself. That was confirmed when Sebastián laughed knowingly.

“Won’t you introduce us, bonbomcita?” The Spanish lilt in his voice may have sounded like melted honey, but to Mickey it sounded more like fucking vinegar.

Ian brought the sheet up to his chin. “Bonbomcita?”

“Sí, it means lit—” he began, moving a few steps toward the bed, his hand held out in greeting. Ian started to lift his hand in response.

“I swear to god, I will shoot you.”

The pretty Colombian pouted a little at Ian, taking his offered hand in a firm handshake. “Do you think he will shoot me?”

“Um, maybe,” Ian said not pulling his hand out of Sebastián’s fast enough for Mickey’s liking. “Did you do something to piss him off?”

“Doesn’t everything piss him off? Who can tell?” Sebastián laughed again, looking deeply into Ian’s eyes like they were sharing a secret. And Ian blinked at him. Was he batting his fucking lashes?

“Someone is gonna die in a minute,” Mickey threatened, which only made the two men look at him with adoring smiles. Was he losing his touch?

Sighing heavily, he asked, “What the fuck are you doing skulking around in the middle of the night? And how the hell did you know I was here?” The gun was now hanging at his side, and he was considering using it on himself.

“We will speak outside and let this lovely creature get back to sleep,” Sebastián cooed, keeping his eyes on the lovely creature who smiled back like a deer caught in headlights or some shit.

“Fine,” Mickey responded with a frown at Ian. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

Sebastián looked like he was considering reaching over to kiss Ian good-bye, so Mickey barked, “Out.”

Once the Colombian had chuckled his way out the door, Mickey stalked to the bed, bent down and planted his lips on Ian’s pushing him back into his pillow. Ian’s hands came up to Mickey’s back to pull him down, but after sucking hard on Ian’s bottom lip, he stood up and grunted as he walked out of the room. Pretty fucking proud of himself for not peeing on Ian to mark his territory.

The front patio was still softly illuminated, so Mickey was able to find his cigarettes sitting on the patio table. He laid his gun down and lit one before turning to Sebastián with an expectant look on his face.

The man was sprawled on the patio sofa, looking at Mickey with a full-on smirk. To egg him on a little more, Sebastián licked his lips and murmured a soft “mmm” as he looked through the door that was still partially open.

Mickey reached out and pulled the cabana door closed forcefully. When he turned back with a glare, Sebastián surrendered. “Okey, I see this is someone special. I am guessing the someone who keeps my Michael’s heart chained up, yes?”

Mickey dropped down to the lounger, a flash of what had occurred on that lounger earlier in the evening invading his mind. “I’m sure the hours and hours of deep, meaningful conversation that we’ve had has given you the impression that I want to have this conversation with you, but you’d be fucking wrong.”

“I suppose it is the quest to tame you that makes you so irresistible.”

“Are we still on this?”

“No,” with that Sebastián sat forward and lowered his voice. “I am here because I want to have a discussion with Mickey Milkovich.”

  

Ian rolled onto his side so he could stare at the closed door to the cabana, wishing for the super power that would allow him to see through walls. He was dying to know what the two of them were talking about. Even though the intruder was gorgeous, like super power level gorgeous, Ian wasn’t worried that Mickey was outside drooling all over the guy. He’d made it clear who he wanted.

But he knew that this guy was the link to the drug trade around here, and therefore to finding Lip. Why was he trying to break into their room tonight? Obviously not for a social visit. Ian frowned wondering what would have happened if Mickey hadn’t gotten the upper hand.

How did Mickey know the guy was outside? Wasn’t he sleeping? Talk about super powers. Okay, so that idea made a definite impression on Ian’s libido. Jesus, he was more concerned about fucking Mickey, again, than with finding Lip. Well, they could do both, right? Only if Mickey would get his ass back in here.

Unable to stand it, he got out of bed, pulled on his shorts and picked a mango from the bowl of fruit sitting on the little kitchen table. He paced around the room and over to the window, maybe leaning toward the opening a little. While he really wasn’t putting much effort into eavesdropping, figuring he’d just badger Mickey into telling him everything anyway, he choked a little on the mango flesh when he heard “Mickey Milkovich” drift through the open window.

Holy shit! What the hell? Now Ian moved right up to the curtain pushing the corner aside so he could peek out at the patio. He could see Mickey’s dark hair and a curl of smoke.

“Tell me why I shouldn’t kill you and dispose of your body?” Mickey asked tightly.

“Then you would have to add cop killer to your list of crimes,” Sebastián still didn’t seem worried about Mickey’s threats, or he was skilled at hiding his reactions.

“You’re a fucking cop?” As Mickey spat out these words, Ian could feel the mango he’d swallowed coming back up.

“Undercover. For so long now, I sometimes forget myself which side I’m on,” he laughed lightly. “When you mentioned the formula yesterday, I finally did some looking into your background. Interesting story, no?”

There was a moment of silence, which Ian assumed was filled with Mickey rubbing his nose, biting his lip, rolling his shoulders, some small tic that allowed him a physical release from the internal turmoil.

“Michael Alexander is a ghost, but Ian Gallagher is not. Of course, I had to change the spelling a little to find him. But I also know that the General is currently entertaining a gentleman by the name of Phillip Gallagher. Two plus two, as they say.”

Ian had to sit down in the wicker basket chair because air was no longer getting to his chest. It was happening again! Mickey was going to get fucked over because of him, even if he didn’t do it on purpose. Ian’s name etched into Mickey’s chest and Ian himself etched into Mickey’s heart. He was always going to be Mickey’s downfall.

“So you here to arrest me?”

Ian flew to the door and swung it open. Both men looked at him in surprise, again. “No!” He took the two steps that separated him from Mickey and dropped to his knees between his thighs, gripping them tightly as he leaned forwarded eye to eye. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, looking between Mickey’s eyes and searching for forgiveness. “For fucking things up for you.”

“S’okay,” Mickey whispered back swiping his thumb under Ian’s eye to capture the lone tear sitting there. He slid the thumb down the bridge of Ian’s pink nose. “You burned a little.”

Releasing Mickey’s name on a sigh, Ian met his lips and they closed their eyes. There was no intent behind the kiss, it was just for connection and reassurance. Ian’s arms wound around Mickey’s neck to keep him in place and Mickey’s hands remained on Ian’s face to keep him steady.

After a moment, Mickey pulled back a little and smiled at Ian. “Better?”

“No,” he said harshly and whipped around to glare at Sebastián. “I will shoot him myself.”

“Ah, _amor verdadero_. I am jealous,” Sebastián said with a dramatic sigh. “Ian, no need to hurt me. I am here to see if Mickey and I can use each other. Outside the bedroom, of course.”

Ian tucked himself closer into Mickey’s body at that final comment, which was transparent in its attempt to throw Ian off a little. He wanted to sit in Mickey’s lap, but felt that was maybe inappropriate for the situation, so instead he sat beside Mickey but made sure there wasn’t a single molecule separating them.

“I have needs, you have needs. Let’s work together,” Sebastián suggested, laying his arms along the back of the wicker sofa.

“What do you have in mind?” Mickey asked.

  

A few minutes later, Sebastián had given them the lowdown on his role in the Colombian narco-trafficking world both as an undercover _Jungla Commando_ , the national counter-narcotics unit, and as a high-level trafficker under the former General Delia Rojas Herrara.

Mickey could see Ian’s huge eyes and stunned expression in his peripheral vision and figured it probably matched his own expression at the moment.

“So what do you want from me?” he asked, feeling Ian’s hand wrap more securely around his thigh. It felt kinda good to have a little guard dog by his side.

“I know that General Herrara has a large shipment of cocaine ready for transport,” Sebastián explained then turned his attention to Ian. “I also know that your brother, Ian, is working with her to create a more powerful drug. But I’m being shut out of the top-level details. The General didn’t get to where she is by being easy to take down.”

“So you know what my brother is doing here? Is he in trouble?”

“My government and the American government are both very interested in talking to him.”

“How interested?”

“Mucho.”

Mickey could feel Ian tense up and knew that he was gonna trip headlong into a panic attack any moment. “Hey,” he said turning to look into his worried green eyes. “Go grab the asparagus, okay?”

Ian jumped up quickly and as he walked into the cabana, Sebastián asked, “Is this an, ehm, open relationship?” Mickey’s eyes snapped to his. “Room for a third?”

While the basest part of his brain could appreciate the idea, Mickey also knew that he would gnaw off Sebastián’s arm before he let him touch Ian, so it seemed pretty fucking unlikely that they’d be engaging in a threesome. Then Ian appeared at the door holding the two cans of asparagus, and Mickey wanted to dig Sebastián’s eyeballs out of his head and squash them under his foot, so the answer was definitely gonna be a no.

“¿ _Espárragos_?”

“You got your Leatherman on you?”

Sebastián pulled the steel multi-tool out of his pocket with a quirked eyebrow, and Mickey told Ian to pass the cans to him. “Open them up.”

  

A half hour later, Mickey and Ian were alone on the patio, side by side watching Sebastián disappear into the night. The sun would be up within an hour, and they had to figure out a plan to get Lip out of a cocaine processing lab hidden in a Colombian sugarcane plantation. Three days ago, Ian would have laughed at that thought as it sounded like the trailer for a movie, but now it seemed like a perfectly logical chain of events and, if anyone could accomplish those tasks, it was the man beside him.

Sebastián was going to let them know when the General and her bodyguards would be away from the lab, making it easier for them to extract Lip. Now that Sebastián knew how the drugs were going to be transported, the drug bust would happen as soon as the shipment of asparagus hit the port in either Cartagena or Barranquilla.

Once the bust was underway and arrests were being made, he wasn’t sure if Lip would become a casualty, and both the Colombian and the US governments were interested in having him safely delivered. They needed him out and safe, but without risking Sebastián’s cover.

But Ian needed to do something first. He needed to say sorry properly.

He slid off the end of the lounger and scuttled between Mickey’s legs again. Smiling into the surprised blue eyes, he laid a kiss on his throat, then collarbone all while pulling open the button on Mickey’s jeans. “What are you up to, Gallagher?”

Pushing lightly on Mickey’s chest until he was resting back on his elbows, Ian placed a few more kisses on his chest and abdomen. “Nothing.” He smiled like a flirt into those blue eyes he’d missed so much, but melted at Mickey’s look of adoration.

“I love you so much,” he blurted.

Ian’s heart sank as soon as he uttered the words. He had vowed to himself that he’d let Mickey be the one to decide when and where to bring up feelings. Shit, shit, shit. He dropped his head to stare at Mickey’s lap in a combination of shame and regret.

“That right? How much is so much?” Mickey asked. At this, Ian popped up from Mickey’s lap to look him in the eye again. “Go on,” he encouraged Ian with a flick of his wrist.

Totally willing to take Mickey up on the opportunity, Ian took a deep breath. “Well, it’s like I’ve loved you in three phases,” he began, and Mickey punched out a laugh. “At the beginning, I tried to love you, but you couldn’t let me. Then I tried not to love because you were gone. Now it’s like the floodgates have opened, and I’m not going to be able to stop myself. Maybe it’ll freak you out a little.”

Sitting back up so he could pull Ian close, Mickey looked at him softly. “Ian, in the beginning, loving you saved me from myself. In the middle, loving you gave me something to hold on to. Right now, loving you just makes me fucking happy. You gotta know that loving you is a way of life for me.”

They kissed quickly and harshly because Ian had other plans.  

When Mickey’s head fell back between his shoulders, Ian matched the movements of his mouth to the vein throbbing in Mickey’s exposed throat.


	11. Superman

Racing on the thunder and rising with the heat

It’s gonna take a superman to sweep me off my feet.

 

Ian was alternating between smoking, pacing and trying to get into Mickey’s pants—again. They were exhausted and keyed up now that the shit was about to get serious. Ian needed to calm the fuck down if he was going to be of any use to them.

Mickey put down the pencil he was tapping against the table top and with a final look at the crude map, pulled Ian out to the balcony of their third-floor hotel room in Turbo. He scanned the streets below them. His eyes travelled over pool halls, flophouses and a shaded plaza where any number of deals were taking place in the early evening dusk.

Turbo was a dodgy port town in Colombia bordering the Darién Gap, therefore, the perfect location to house a drug cartel. It was a two-hour boat ride from Capurgana during which Ian had vomited over the side of the 30-foot cuddy cabin cruiser a handful of times. When they’d crossed the Gulf of Urabá, where the marine currents are choppy this time of year, Ian had suffered. Plus no amount of sunscreen was able to protect his nose from burning in the hot Caribbean sun. Now he was a jittery mess, over-tired, worried and not in control. Mickey hoped that dragging Ian outside for some fresh air would get his mind off the shit that was about to go down.

It was a balmy evening and the sun was just finishing setting. In the distance, fishermen were arranging their nets after a full day at sea. Watching them move through their daily ritual, Mickey felt like it had been several lifetimes since he’d done mundane daily tasks and he wondered if he ever would again.

Passing the lit cigarette to Ian, he laced his hand behind Ian’s head and pulled him down to kiss the bridge of his nose.

“Kissing it all better?” Ian asked touching the tip of his bright red nose with his finger.

“It’s gonna peel.”

Ian rubbed his nose, a worried look on his face. Mickey smirked, “We’re going to infiltrate a coke processing lab and you’re worried that your nose might peel. Don’t worry. You’ll still be pretty.”

“I know,” he smirked back.

“Let’s review the plan one more time. Then we’re fucking having a nap until Sebastián texts that it’s time go,” Mickey announced firmly. Ian looked doubtful, but nodded. “I’m not going into a drug-op with you wired like a fucking tweeker.” Eying Ian’s tense expression, he added, “You’ll stay behind, man. I fucking swear, I will tie you to a chair if I have to.”

“But you need me to convince Lip to leave,” Ian protested.

“No, I’ll drag Lip out of there by his fucking hair. With pleasure.”

“Okay, okay. Yes, let’s go lay down.” He took a deep, calming breath and returned to the hotel room. As he stretched out on the bed, he linked his hands behind his head and recited, “Sebastián will confirm that the General and her bodyguards have left the compound. Then we’ll take the jeep parked in the alley behind the hotel to the compound. You have the keys in your pocket?”

Mickey nodded as he studied the layout of the abandoned sawmill and surrounding sugarcane fields that Sebastián had drawn on a sheet of loose-leaf paper. He had it memorized but continued to stare at it embedding every entrance and exit in his mind. What they were about to do was fucking dangerous. You don’t just waltz into a Colombian drug operation and take what you want then waltz out without expecting trouble. He knew well what they did to anyone who fucked with them because he wasn’t completely unfamiliar with that kind of behaviour himself.

“What else you got in all those pockets? They’re bulging.”

Patting the sides of his military-style cargo pants, he shrugged, “I ain’t going into a fucking fight unprepared.”

“So you’re not just happy to see me?” Ian’s hand travelled down his chest until it reached his jeans. He pulled the end of his t-shirt up to reveal a slice of abdomen. Mickey watched each movement closely experiencing equal portions of lust, frustration and fear.

To Mickey’s mind, the trouble in this mission was his fucking redhead. It was a potentially lethal combination to mix Ian’s inexperience in skulking around with Mickey’s bone deep worry over something happening to him. Neither of them were going in prepared.

“Fuck.”

“Yes, please.”

Mickey shook his head. “I said nap, Ian.”

“Right. Let’s nap,” Ian stated firmly, unzipping his jeans. “You should take those pants off to nap. They’ll be too uncomfortable to lay down in.”

Mickey was gonna be firm in this; they needed to nap. He stayed strong as he undressed and watched Ian undress. He stayed strong when Ian cuddled into his arms and pressed his cheek to Mickey’s chest. He stayed strong while Ian ran his fingers over the tattoo on his chest.

He tried to stay strong when Ian whispered, “You’ve always been under my skin too, Mickey. Always.” His arms tightened around Ian, and he blatantly disregarded his common sense to steal one kiss. Just one.

Or two.

  

Just after midnight, Mickey and Ian arrived at the outskirts of Domingodo, a dead-end village north of Turbo. They pulled off the narrow, gravel road and cut the engine of the Land Rover. From here the plan was to skirt the village by passing through the endless plantation of banana palms and sugarcane being raised as a cover for the more lucrative cocaine processing lab.

Once they arrived at the abandoned sawmill, they would locate Lip in the smallest of the three pre-fab buildings. Ian would explain the shit storm that was about to erupt and how it was in Lip’s best interest to just walk away from whatever the fuck he thought he was doing making a deal with Colombian drug runners, then they’d get the fuck out.

The final step was to deliver Lip to Sebastián’s Jungla unit in Cartagena where they would make a deal with him to hand over his formula in exchange for not spending the rest of his life in a Colombian prison. He’d walk away poor but still have both his freedom and all his body parts.

Their plan was going quite smoothly. They reached the edge of the compound without any issues and Mickey crouched down among the stalks of the sugarcane plants to get his bearings. He knew from the map that the two smaller buildings were arranged end to end on the east side of the compound, and the larger building that housed the old mill ran perpendicular to the other buildings. Further west was a series of smaller units that would once have been the offices for the sawmill, but were now sleeping quarters for the men.

Looking at the clearing now, he could also make out a broken board edger and blade sharpener amid the overgrowth of signal grass and plantain stems. They were about 100 feet from the door to the building where Lip was supposed to be. This was the trickiest part of this whole mission, getting from the cane field to the building unseen.

While the full moon had been helpful in getting them through the field to the compound, it was not in their favour now as it would make them easy to see as they ran toward the building.

Sebastián had provided the typical location of the guards, and Mickey could see one of the them leaning against the side of a rusted out twin blade circular saw set up on a rotting wooden platform. His tattooed face eerie in the moonlight.

Shit. If Mickey could see him from this distance, then he and Ian were going to be easy to spot. He was going to need to distract the guard while Ian located Lip. Stepping back into the tall leaves, he found Ian chewing a fingernail, his eyes darting around the darkness.

“Well?” he whispered.

Mickey just stared at him for a minute, unsure whether he would be able to walk away from Ian even if it meant he’d likely be safer. Once he was out of Mickey’s sight, he couldn’t protect him.

“Mickey?”

“Fuck. Okay. I’m going to distract the guard and you’re going to run like the fucking wind to Lip’s Quonset. Sebastián said they don’t lock the outer buildings as nothing much goes on in them. The actual lab is in the larger building where a guard is posted.” Mickey clasped his hand around the soft flesh of Ian’s waist. “You got your gun?”

Ian nodded and swallowed. He probably wasn’t any more interested in being separated from Mickey than Mickey was, but knew they just needed to get this over with.

“You remember how to use it?”

“It may have been years since ROTC, but I still remember how to shoot a gun.”

Mickey sniffed torn between pride and doubt. “Wait until you see the guard’s attention shift away from you, then keep your goddamn head down and do NOT leave that building without me. Got it?”

“I love you.”

“Then gimme a goddamn kiss.”

 

Ian could swear that his beating heart was trumpeting through the entire planation and would alert every drug runner for miles around. One part of his brain felt like it was watching the scenario because it refused to believe that this was actually happening, while the other part was considering breaking into fits of hysterical laughter at the idea of Ian Gallagher running through a sugarcane planation avoiding Colombian drug runners in an attempt to save his brother from spending life in prison.

The dark-skinned guard suddenly raised his rifle and moved a little away from the vicious looking saw he was leaning against. Ian couldn’t hear whatever had taken his attention, but he didn’t wait to find out what the guard was going to do. He just dashed out into the clearing and ran as fast as his long legs would carry him, thanking himself for every jog he’d ever taken. Who knew it would end up saving his ass?

When he reached the semi-circular corrugated building, he twisted the metal knob on the small side door praying to any god who would listen that Lip was inside and that he was alone.

One bare lightbulb hung from the arched frame illuminating the 40-foot-long space littered with what looked to Ian’s eye like garbage: a bunch of old microwaves, used plastic containers, rotting boxes, empty plastic jugs and, in front of it all, Lip. He was laying on a metal cot with two German shepherds dozing at his feet.

At his entrance, the dogs lifted their heads and cocked them at Ian taking a moment to decide if he was friend or foe. They must have decided foe because they rose to all fours and filled the room with a low growl.

“Ian? What the fuck?” Lip swung his legs over the edge of the cot and stared at his brother. “What the hell are you doing here?”

Ian couldn’t reply as he’d entered into a staring contest with one of the dogs. It flitted through his mind that making eye contact might be a bad idea, but he wasn’t capable of looking away.

The dogs continued to growl but otherwise remained at Lip’s feet. “Ian!”

At the sound of his brother’s harsh voice, Ian snapped out of his staring contest. “Lip! Fuck. Are they going to attack me?” he asked warily, glancing between two pairs of narrowed brown eyes and one pair of blue.

“Probably not. Men come and go all the time. They seem to be trained to keep me from going anywhere. We’re attached at the hip,” Lip explained now fully standing but not moving toward Ian. “It’s cause I sent you that damn email, isn’t it? You’re always so fucking impulsive.”

“You’re always so fucking stupid!”

Lip tilted his head a little neither accepting nor denying that comment. “How’d you fucking find me?”

“Mickey.”

Lip’s eyes widened in amazement. “Milkovich?”

“How many Mickeys do you know?”

“One too many, apparently.”

“Yeah, well, because of him, you’re not going to spend the rest of your useless life in a Colombian prison,” Ian hissed at him. “That’s if we can get out of here alive and with our heads still attached.”

“I didn’t ask you to come riding in here with your black fucking stallion,” he objected with a roll of his shoulders. “I’m figuring things out here.”

Ian knew they didn’t have time for games because they needed to be ready to leave when Mickey got here, so he got straight to the point. “Colombian drug enforcement knows all about you and your super drug and they aren’t too happy about it. Obviously.”

“No shit, huh?”

“No shit.”

They stared at each other, while the dogs stood guard at Lip’s feet.

“You got a smoke, man?”

Ian narrowed his eyes but threw his pack at him, keeping the door close enough that if the dogs changed their minds and decided to gnaw on him, he’d be able to make a swift exit.

“Okay, Ian. What are you and your fucking hero planning to do to get us out of here?”

“You’ll come?”

“Do I have a choice?”

Ian thought of Mickey out there distracting the guard and risking him life because Ian needed to know his brother was safe. “No.”

“Yeah, well, shit was going south here anyway. I haven’t seen Jimmy in 3 days and something’s not right with my fucking formula. But these assholes are too impatient to work around the kinks,” he admitted with an indifferent shrug.

“You’re working with Jimmy?”

“How else you think I’d make contact with a South American cartel?” he smiled at Ian. “Craigslist?”

“Jesus, Lip. This shit is fucking real. It’s not some stupid prank.”

Lip shrugged, giving Ian a small smile. “Yeah.”

  

After drawing the guard’s attention by making a scuffling noise in the field near him, Mickey began circling back to Lip’s building. While the guard was busy shining his flashlight into the rows of tall sugarcane, Mickey sprinted across the clearing.

The brothers looked at him when he entered, and a pair of muscular dogs watched him with their dark, alert eyes.

“Seriously? Fucking dogs,” he grumbled. He wasn’t prepared for that.

One of the dogs let out a yelp that echoed off the thin steel walls of the building. “He doesn’t like you Milkovich,” Lip smirked.

“Well, if they fucking like you, then they got shit for taste,” Mickey snapped. “Why the hell aren’t they attacking?”

“They’re guard dogs not attack dogs. We can do anything we’d like except leave.”

“What will happen if we try to leave?”

“They’ll bark their asses off and alert every guard in this compound.”

“Fucking perfect,” he frowned at each dog in turn. “Christ, I ain’t shooting them.”

“We need to incapacitate them,” Ian offered.

Mickey started to move around the room, looking for something that would help. While he hadn’t thought twice about crushing the guy’s windpipe when he’d kidnapped Ian, he sure as shit wasn’t interested in hurting a couple of well-behaved German shepherds. But he couldn’t let the dogs give away their presence either.

He tipped a couple of blue dented metal containers sideways to peer inside, but only found some dirt-filled black plastic bags. A wooden crate held an assortment of mismatched rubber boots. Turning back to the brothers who were watching him poke around, he muttered in frustration, “Fuck, there must be something in this garbage heap that will help.”

He noticed a half-finished bowl of stew near the cot Lip was standing beside. “This your leftover supper, Philip? Got any meat in it?”

“Yeah, there was some chorizo sausage in it.”

Mickey used the spoon to dig out some chunks of sausage then placed them on the side plate. “Ian, what ya got for pills? Anything that could knock a dog out?”

Ian pulled the silver pill box out of his jeans pocket and lifted the lid. “Holy shit, I have a motherfucking sleeping pill.” He moved toward Mickey, the pill in his hand.

“Why you got sleeping pills, Ian?” Mickey asked gently, looking up from the plate of food he was arranging. He knew Ian’s health was a sensitive topic, but he’d always needed to know, to understand the inside of Ian’s mind.

Ian shrugged a little. “Sometimes I can’t turn my brain off,” he replied, looking almost shy. “I get thinking about something and can’t stop.”

They stared at each other for long enough that Lip cleared his throat. “Get a fucking room already.”

“We had a fucking room, asshole. But we got dragged out of it because you decided it was a good idea to get in bed with General Herrara,” Mickey bitched but returned to the task at hand. “Pass me that sleeping pill. Do dogs fucking fall asleep if they take ‘em?”

“They knock me out in about 20 minutes.”

The dogs happily scarfed down the sausage once the pill was crushed and divided between them. While the three men stared at the dogs waiting for any sign the pills were working, Mickey peppered Lip with questions about the compound. How many guards were generally around, how much activity occurred at night, when he expected the General to return. Lip wasn’t much help as he’d spent his time between his building and the large processing lab, never given a real run of the place.

Then the first dog lowered his head to his paws. “Your shit all ready to go, Gallagher?”

 

Ian was tucked behind Mickey as he opened the door to the Quonset, peering out before opening it fully. They stepped outside, and Lip closed the door silently behind them. Facing the backside of the second small building, Mickey had his Ruger in his right hand and Ian’s hand in his left. As they came to the edge of the building preparing to make the sprint across the clearing, a familiar tattooed face came around the corner, assault rifle aimed in their direction.

It was hard to say who among them was the most surprised, but it was easy to say who was the quickest to respond. Mickey hand his hand on the barrel casing and his Ruger tucked in his pants before the guard realized what happened. Once his second hand was free, Mickey brought it up to the carry handle at the top of the rifle’s handguard, and he pulled fiercely attempting to yank the gun from the guy’s grip. At the same time, the guard pulled back on the rifle’s stock. So Mickey released his grip enough that the man stumbled backward into the building with a loud metallic bang.

Initially, Ian thought the sound was the guard hitting the building, but realized quickly it was his gun firing. And knew that was going to alert every other guard.

Mickey swore almost as loud and gave one more yank to the man’s rifle dislodging it from his hands, then jabbing the stock of the gun into the man’s gut. When he dropped to his knees, the fiberglass end of the gun collided with his jaw. At the cracking sound, Ian wasn’t sure if it was the gun or the guy’s jaw that had broken.

As he toppled over, Mickey barked, “Fucking run.” He grabbed Ian’s hand again and took off across the open area. The sound of men yelling and guns firing sent them diving behind the blade sharpener rusted and rotting in the clearing about halfway between the Quonset and the sugarcane field.

Ian saw Mickey glance at him and Lip then around the side of the old piece of machinery. He fired off two rounds from the assault rifle he’d taken off the unconscious guard then turned to Ian. Between bursts of breath, he explained, “When I say go, cover your ears tight and fucking run. Don’t look in the direction of the sound.” He pulled out a small steel canister about the size of a bottle of cough medicine from the pocket of his cargo pants.

Another round of shots rang out.

“Ready?” He pulled the metal pin out of the stun grenade and threw it overhand toward the location of the other shooters. A split second before the first blast, he yelled, “Run!”

The three of them flew across the clearing as intense booms and smoky flashes filled the night air and turned the area bright.  Crashing through the 8-foot-tall stalks and leaves, they didn’t stop when the blasts stopped nor when the only sound they heard was their harsh breathing and pounding feet.

It took them ten minutes of flat out running to reach the Land Rover, panting heavily, sweating profusely and scratched up to shit. They likely had less than a couple of minute’s head start on the guards, and Mickey had the jeep’s key out and ready by the time they arrived at it.

Yanking open the passenger door, Lip crawled over the console to reach the back seat, laughing and hooting. “Holy shit, that was fucked up.”

Ian turned toward Mickey as he settled in his seat and they shot back out to the road. He wanted to kiss Mickey right now. In fact, he wanted to do more than kiss him. Damn, if Lip wasn’t here—

“You’re fucking shot!”

Mickey’s right thigh was soaked in blood and he had a jagged hole in his pants.

“Nothing we can do about it right now, so calm the fuck down.”

“I will not calm the fuck down. You’re shot!”

“Ian, I know I’m shot. But I’m also driving and we’re not out of danger yet.”

“Why the hell are you driving? Why didn’t you give me the keys?” Ian snapped.

“Cause we didn’t have time to put our seatbelts on and shoulder check before pulling out into traffic.”

Lip laughed from the backseat. “Here,” he said passing Ian a t-shirt he’d pulled from his backpack. Ian pressed the cloth to the wound in Mickey’s thigh using the palm of his hand. When Mickey sucked in a gulp of air, Ian felt it too.

“Oh, god,” he whined. “You can’t keep driving. We need to pull over soon, so I can take care of this.”

When Mickey just continued to drive without comment, he added, “Please.”

Tapping the steering wheel, Mickey said, “We’ll be passing a small village soon. We can pull in there behind a building and swap seats. Now light me a fucking smoke.”

After pulling over so Lip could take over the 4-hour drive to Cartagena, they got in the back seat and Mickey draped his legs over Ian’s lap. Poking around the first aid kit in Mickey’s backpack, Ian found mini scissors and cut open the cargo pants. The bullet had only skimmed the side of his leg, about an inch below the scar left from another bullet.

“Again?” Ian tsked, gently pressing an antiseptic pad to the wound.

“Again.”

“That makes three," Ian mused. “All because of me.”

“My good luck charm,” Mickey smiled and ran his hand along the back of Ian’s neck. “Good thing I got my very own EMT.”

“Gonna take real good care of you.”

“Get a fucking room,” Lip threw over his shoulder, smoking curling from the cigarette between his lips.

 

Three days later, Ian perused the offerings in the breakfast buffet of their hotel in Cartagena. He gathered a plateful of fried eggs over rice and beans and a cup of strong coffee, then placed them in front of Mickey before going back for his own.

Mickey was reclining in a booth with his bandaged leg carefully propped up by his pesky nurse, who treated him like a dying patient. While they ate, Mickey watched the news station playing on the flat screen tv. Ian looked at it occasionally, but couldn’t understand what was being said. Eventually though, he could tell by Mickey’s body language that something interesting was being reported.

Ian turned fully toward the screen. A stocky middle-aged man with a thick mustache and a mud brown slouch hat emblazoned with the Colombian National Police emblem was speaking and, occasionally, the camera would cut to shots of boxes of canned asparagus displayed attractively for the camera.

Mickey grinned at Ian. “Turns out the Colombian authorities confiscated 13.8 tons of cocaine packaged in cans of asparagus. The biggest drug bust in history.”

Ian grinned back.

 


	12. Epilogue: 'Til the End of the Night

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For Ride4812: because it's Ride4812, she's my hero for driving the Gallavich bus while we all cry in the back <3

I’m holding out for a hero ‘til the end of the night.

 

“Excuse me!” Ian called out from the upstairs veranda of the luxury villa in Bocagrande, an upscale oceanfront community in Cartagena. “Pool boy!”

The “pool boy” stopped swiping the leaf skimmer over the L shaped infinity pool’s surface. A cigarette was hanging from his lips and Ray-ban sunglasses sat on his nose. He turned to the man leaning over the glass railing above him. Even from here, he could see the red bridge of his nose. He keeps forgetting to put sunscreen on before he goes outside, Mickey thought and made a mental note to put some in their jeep.

“Yes, sir,” he drawled. “How can I help you?”

“Would you come up here and give me a hand with something?”

After hanging the leaf skimmer in the pool shed and disposing of his cigarette in the outside trash, he stepped through the wide patio doors to the all white living room and the open staircase. He took the stairs two at a time.

Ian was laying on a lounge chair on the main bedroom’s veranda, naked. Mickey pulled his sunglasses off and looked down at him. “Well, this is highly inappropriate.”

“Am I making you uncomfortable?” Ian asked, his eyes on the front of Mickey’s low-slung Bermuda shorts.

“Uh, yeah,” he replied. “Really fucking uncomfortable.”

“Would you mind putting some sunscreen on my back for me?”

Mickey snatched the bottle out of Ian’s hand and put a tiny drop on the end of his finger. Stepping one leg over the side of the lounger, he sat down on Ian’s thighs then ran his sunscreen covered finger along the bridge of Ian’s burned nose. “You never listen.”

“Sorry, I forgot again,” Ian apologized then frowned. “You’re breaking character, Mick. This is not the behavior of a shy inexperienced pool boy.”

This made Mickey laugh out loud. “That’s the plot of this porno?”

“Yes, I’m the experienced rich older man and you’re the young innocent virgin looking for a strong man to show him the, um, ropes.”

“Mmm,” came Mickey’s voice from side of Ian’s neck. “Go on.”

“Well, I’m supposed to call you up here to help me with something, but instead I—.”

Mickey pulled back from Ian’s neck when he paused. “You what?”

“Seriously, a virgin would not know how to rock his hips like that,” Ian complained.

Mickey returned to Ian’s neck, his tongue circling close to the earlobe. “Maybe I’m just a natural lover and I don’t need a teacher.”

“Well, that’s no fun for me,” he pouted.

“It’s not?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Okay,” Mickey stood up and stepped away from Ian. He linked his hands behind his back and toed the side of the lounger. “Excuse me, Mr. Gallagher. I’m just poor little virgin who needs a big, strong man to show me the ways of the world.”

With that he turned toward the bedroom and wiggled his ass a little so his shorts slipped down over his hips and fell to the floor as he reached the king-sized bed. He climbed onto the white duvet and crawled to the top of the bed to lay back against the stacks of black and white pillows, fluttering his eyelashes at Ian, who was now standing up but hadn’t moved into the room yet.

“I’ve never been kissed or touched.” At this, Ian lifted his brows and took a step forward until he could reach the tube of lubricant. “I’ve never had a man’s cock in my mouth.” Ian was at the foot of the bed in a flash, his slicked-up hand stroking himself. “I’ve never been fucked. I want you to be my first.”

“Holy shit, we’d make millions if we posted that on PornHub,” Ian breathed into Mickey’s mouth as he landed on top of him. Their tongues did a little dance until Ian added. “You deserve an award for that acting.”

“It wasn’t really acting.”

Ian started to laugh but pulled back when he sensed Mickey was being serious. “What do you mean?”

“You were my first for all those things.”

There weren’t words for the emotion that filled the room in that moment. It was as though fifteen years of want and need and denial combusted and was replaced by love and trust and hope. “And I’ll be your last.”

Mickey opened his legs, so Ian could move between them. He braced himself on one arm and used his other to bring Mickey’s leg up, placing a kiss on his knee, then pushed himself slowly inside. No foreplay, no preparation, just the act of union. Pure and simple.

They kept their eyes on each other the whole time. Even as orgasm chased their bodies, they used their eyes to express how much they loved each other. Until the very last second. Then they used their mouths.

  

Ian was looking over the once white duvet and wondering how they were going to get it clean. They had been in the vacation rental property management business for almost a year now, and the one thing he could say made him mental was all the fucking white in these fancy ass houses. “Do rich assholes think white is a special right they have? Don’t they fucking know how hard it is to get shit clean?”

Mickey lifted his head from Ian’s belly laying a lazy kiss on it first. “You ask me this every time we bang on someone’s designer bed. I didn’t have an answer for you last time, and I don’t have one now.”

“Yeah, well, you get to do all the outdoor maintenance, and I’m stuck trying to figure out how to clean white sheets and white furniture and white carpet.”

“You and a herd of Colombian cleaning ladies.”

Ian sniffed petulantly.

“Next time you lure unsuspecting virgins to your bed, pick a non-white duvet.”

“Next time you come on a white duvet try to aim for the floor not the center of the goddamn bed. I can’t even try to hide it.”

“There’s no aim involved. This thing’s got a mind of its own.” They cracked up and Ian rolled over so he could cover Mickey’s body with his own. He licked his way into Mickey’s mouth and pushed his legs apart making room for his hips. Mickey wound his arms around his neck.

“You never learn any of life’s lessons, man,” Mickey chuckled but hooked his leg over the back of Ian’s thigh.

“It’s already dirty, so what’s one more cum stain?”

“You could always suck me off, no cum stains to worry about.”

“I’ll put that in the next ad we run on the vacation rental property website.”

Ian had reached Mickey’s belly button when they heard cars pull up in the front driveway. “Are we expecting anyone?” Ian asked.

“No, the owners are out of the country and no one is booked until middle of next week,” Mickey answered although Ian was aware of all this.

They quickly pulled their shorts on and managed to find t-shirts by they time they reached the front foyer. Mickey looked through the narrow window running along the side of the double front doors, then turned slowly toward Ian sucking in a lip thoughtfully.

“What? Mickey? Who is it?” he practically pushed the other man out of the way to see out the window himself. “Oh my god, what do they want? I thought we were done working for them.”

Before he moved away from the window, the door to one of the four black town cars opened and a man got out. “Holy fuck, it’s an American. That’s definitely an American insignia.”

Ian was in an immediate storm of worry, despair, anxiety but mostly anger. “What more could they want from us? Why won’t the fucking world just leave us the fuck alone?” He was storming around the tiled front entry, spitting each word. “Where’s your gun?”

“Why? You gonna shoot someone?”

“If I have to! I won’t let them take you away. We’ll go down in a blaze of glory before that ever happens,” Ian turned to Mickey expectantly. “Don’t laugh at me, I mean it.”

“A blaze of glory?”

“Yes! Guns a blazin’. Oh god, I’m gonna be sick.”

“Come here,” Mickey pulled him forward, thinking of the books that Ian carried around with him all the time now: _The Way of the Peaceful Warrior_ , _Siddhartha_ , _The Untethered Soul_. Constant reminders that our thoughts can be our friends or our enemies.

As the doorbell jangled, Mickey squeezed Ian’s shoulders. “Life unfolds.”

They clinked foreheads lightly. “We surrender,” Ian sighed. “Fuck, I didn’t think it meant actual surrender.”

With a quick kiss, Mickey reached to open the door.

 

The room was suddenly full to the brim with alpha males each looking to the one further up the food chain. A handful of men in military uniforms had waited outside and two were guarding the door from the inside. In a perfectly fitted Armani suit, Sebastián leaned against the back wall checking out Ian as usual, just for the pleasure of getting under Mickey’s skin.

“Mickey Milkovich?”

The sound of his name coming from the tall, blonde American gave Mickey a start. He hadn’t really heard his name in years and coming from the lips of an American official was not how he wanted to hear it ever again.

Ian also snapped to attention at the name and he glued himself to Mickey’s side, his hand clasping around his bicep. Mickey ran his thumb along Ian’s hip.

“Who’s asking?”

“Lieutenant Brandenburg, US Drug Enforcement Agency,” the blond man drawled, his southern roots showing. He held out his hand to Mickey, who stared down at it like it was a Trojan horse. Ian used his grip on Mickey’s arm to move it forward toward the man’s hand. They shook briefly. “You’ve met General Reyes, Director of the Policía Nacional.”

All Mickey could do was nod. He focussed on the feel of Ian’s hand on his arm and the warmth of his body. Whatever happened next, the love they shared was rare, and they were fucking lucky for whatever they got because it was more than most people ever experienced. Looking back on his life, he knew that he’d not been born to live a mundane, ordinary life even if that’s all he ever really wanted. Him and Ian, stopping at the store to pick up milk, renting movies on a Friday night, folding laundry. Fuck, he could barely come up with a list of ordinary activities he was so rusty at living like a normal fucking person.

Turning his head slightly, he found Ian’s lips. Fuck the world and what they think. He had fought kicking and screaming to get where he was now, and he was fucking proud of who he was.

“Do you want to come in?” he asked calmly.

Once they were all seated in the spacious living room overlooking the Caribbean Sea, on Ian’s precious white furniture, Lieutenant Brandenburg began, “First, I thought you’d want to know that your brother has been a tremendous asset to the DEA, and he’s going to be a tremendous asset for a long time to come.”

Ian stiffened a little beside Mickey. “That’s good to hear?” he said but left it hanging at the end.

“He’s got an amazing mind and we’re putting it to good use,” he smiled at Ian with a touch of southern charm, but the implications behind his words were clear. They owned Lip’s ass for as long as they wanted it. Ah, well, Lip always found a way to bounce back.

“But my main reason for stopping by was to let you know that the US government appreciates everything you’ve done to assist in the war on drugs,” he said this with a self-deprecating smile. “Your role in stopping the infamous asparagus shipment and the intel you’ve shared with us this past year have stopped nearly half a billion dollars worth of coke from hitting the streets.”

“I’ll never hold my head up again on the Southside,” Mickey commented, and Ian poked him in the ribs. But Brandenburg barked out a surprised laugh.

“That’s what I’m ultimately here to tell you,” he continued. “If you ever want to hold your head up on the Southside again, you will not be stopped. Mickey Milkovich has received a full pardon.”

Mickey didn’t have to look to know that Ian was gonna be blubbering away at this news and that made him smile. He could always count on Ian to express his feelings for the both of them.

“We also hope that you will continue to work with us. We couldn’t have come up with a better plan than to use a management company to get into the homes of wealthy drug dealers,” he stood up and the other men stood too. “Whatever you decide, you have our support. I’m sure Sebastián will be in touch soon.”

As the men returned to their vehicles, Sebastián hung back on the front steps.

“This your doing, man?” Mickey narrowed his eyes at the Colombian.

“You and Ian have made me the golden boy of law enforcement. People are tripping over themselves to thank me.” He gave Mickey his most charming smile. “Least I could do was use my status to pull some strings.”

Mickey awkwardly nudged Sebastián’s shoulder with his fist. “Well, you know, thanks.”

“I know you aren’t much of a hugger, but your boyfriend is.” He turned his million watt smile to Ian. Taking his hand, he pulled the redhead into his arms until his lips were touching Ian’s ear. After a moment, Ian smiled brightly and kissed Sebastián’s cheek with a soft thank you.

The Colombian’s eyes lit up, and he touched his cheek as he skipped down the front stairs toward the waiting cars.

“What a world class flirt,” Ian gawked.

“Mhm, and what the hell was that all about?” Mickey growled.

Ignoring him, Ian waved at the retreating vehicles like they were family leaving after Thanksgiving dinner. Once the last car turned out of the circular driveway, he threw his arms around Mickey’s neck.

“You didn’t have to shoot anyone, Gallagher.”

“I woulda.”

“You’re my hero,” Mickey pecked at Ian’s lips a little.

“Whatever. We both know you’re my hero.”

“Whatever. We both know you saved me.”

“So maybe we’re even then. We saved each other.”

“We’re square.”

Ian pulled away a little. “So you wanna go home?”

“Do you?”

“Nah uh. This is your decision. I’m going wherever you’re going.”

“You don’t care?”

“Nope. I know what I want, and it doesn’t have anything to do with geography,” Ian explained honestly. “But maybe there’s some unfinished business back in Chicago that you want to take care of?”

“Subtle.”

“We don’t have to decide now,” he pushed Mickey through the open doorway into the front entry. Using his foot to slam the door, he pulled his t-shirt over his head and walked backwards in the direction of the patio doors leading to the pool. He crooked his finger at Mickey, “Let’s go swimming naked and fuck in the pool. Then get into the wine cellar and celebrate Mickey Milkovich’s pardon.”

Mickey reached Ian and wrapped his arms around his waist continuing to walk him backwards occasionally bumping into furniture or the corner of walls as they kissed their way to the pool. Once there, they stripped and jumped into the warm clear water. Surfacing, they grabbed at each other.

“I love you, Ian Gallagher.”

“I love you, too, little candy.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One more thank you to Bonnie Tyler for all her inspiration. To our heroes. <3


End file.
